Are you max-maxxing when you should be satisficing, bro? (Sorry.)
What decision science says about how we make choices and why we’re still unhappy
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities.
Wishing you a great week!
If you consider yourself a conscientious, Type-A person who does research and prepares before making a decision, are you ready to be slightly ←→ very bummed out?
The people who try hardest to make the best decisions are often the least happy with what they choose.
Wait, so are these people, known in decision science as “maximizers,” actually making worse decisions by trying so hard?
Oh no no no, friends. They are, in fact, making better decisions.
But they are less happy with them.
Oh.
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably asking yourself why. Because that seems patently unfair, doesn’t it?
The maximizing alternative—coined by researcher and scholar Herbert A. Simon—is “satisficing”: choosing something relatively quickly that meets your basic criteria. Those folks aren’t making objectively better decisions, but something about their psychology allows them to make the decision and then move the hell on with their lives, content. (Like psychos, we agree?)
But people with strong maximizing tendencies report lower life satisfaction, less happiness, and more regret despite objectively better outcomes because they’ve explored a high number of possibilities which, effectively, haunt them and their better outcomes forever.
Exorcizing your decision ghosts
More choices = more chances that the one you chose was “wrong,” see? More choices = more tradeoffs, more explicit knowledge of the things you gave up by picking what you did. (And we’ve already covered the cognitive bias of loss aversion, wherein our brains hate perceived loss more than they appreciate actual gain.)
Even if we can see the logical fallacy there—that there may not actually be a “right” decision—we still fall victim to comparison, the famous thief of joy. Except we’re not even comparing ourselves to others; we’re comparing ourselves to other versions of ourselves that we nipped in the bud, all our unlived lives that spiral away into unknown possibilities. We’re left with the Ghost of Roads Untraveled (oddly cut from Dickens’s classic tale).
So if you’ve ever invested a lot in making a good decision and it doesn’t bring you the satisfaction you thought it would, know that it’s just the weight of all that unrealized potential following you home.
There’s a whole body of research on this “But what if…” style of rumination called counterfactual thinking. Humans are remarkably good at imagining torturing themselves with alternate versions of reality:
What if I’d picked the other apartment?
What if I hadn’t quit my job?
What if I kept dating instead of settling down?
Maximizers do more of this hypothetical, decision-tree, flow-chart thinking than those with satisficing tendencies. Which kinda means the decision never really ends. Over time, this creates a strange inversion: The more effort you put into making the right choice, the harder it becomes to feel settled in it.
How to satisfice
To be clear, the takeaway here is not to stop caring about your decisions or to lower your standards. There’s a version of this conversation that veers into complacency, carelessness, and anti-ambition, which I don’t find particularly useful. Plus, some decisions—like those with super objective, maximizable outcomes—benefit from rigor.
But we tend to think that a lot more things fall into that category than actually do.
We turn low-risk, reversible choices into miniature existential crises. We spend disproportionate energy on decisions that don’t meaningfully benefit from it. And then we lug around the psychological cost of all of them, less happy, statistically, than if we had simply made a checklist and jumped on the first thing that met it.
So rather than swinging from one extreme to the other, it can be helpful to think explicitly and in advance about which choices actually benefit from maximizing—choices with objectively optimizable outcomes—and which you’re better off satisficing.
Satisficing, in this light, is not about settling. It’s about deciding what matters before you start choosing. It’s committing to:
These are my criteria.
This is what “good enough” looks like.
When I find it, I’m done.
The uncomfortable part is that satisfaction, it turns out, is not a property of the option. It’s a property of the decision. Meaning: Your happiness is more dependent on how you choose than what you choose.
Happy list-making, everybody! 🫡
Over to you…
Are you a maximizer, or a satisficer? Do you have decision-making strategies that help you feel satisfied? Let us know!
But wait! There’s more…
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