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Barry Schwartz

Call me a Satisficer – for sure

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The term Paradox of Choice, also the title of Barry Schwartz’s book on the pitfalls of decision making, pits freedom to choose, a desirable process, against the fact that choice leads often to less satisfaction. Not only can an overwhelming number of choices make you indecisive, but it generally produces less happiness with the outcome given the number of “missed” possible alternatives. Today I’ll introduce one of his other brilliant theorems – the distinction between people who are maximizers and those who are satisficers (a word creation from satisfied and suffice.)

(Full disclosure, Barry, who this year retired from a long and distinguished career at Swarthmore College, is a family friend. In fact another embarrassing moment of my life happened when visiting him at some coastal holiday and one of my kids decided then and there, age 4 or so, to make good on his threat to run away from home. Barefoot, no less. We all combed the woods of Tillamook County instead of talking psychology. Happy ending, I’m glad to report, other than having aged 20 years in two hours.)

 

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Maximizers are people who only want the best, and are willing to put in the effort, time, energy and whatever other resource to get there. Satisficers are happy with something that’s good enough. Count me among them. Of course it’s never  a black and white picture. Most people fall somewhere in between, and for each of us we probably maximize in some areas of our lives while “good enough” rules the others. But it is certainly true that those who truly maximize, say at a job search, end up with objectively improved outcomes: they land better jobs and on average start with a 20% higher salary. Before you say anything: here is the dilemma. These people, subjectively, are much less happy with those outcomes than the satisficers who did not put much effort into the job search. Money ain’t buying happiness? Not even correlating to happiness!

And speaking of correlations: maximizers are on average more depressed than satisficers, and report lower satisfaction in life. Satisficers are found to make overall good decisions, just not the seemingly “perfect” ones. Interestingly enough there seem to be no gender differences in what category people tend to fall (although I have yet to find a male who is a maximizer when it comes to buying shoes….. girl friends, you know who you are….).

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The Psychological Immune System

· Simulated happiness - as good as the real thing ·

Mr. Cogito's Envoy-Zbiegnew Hrbert

Yesterday I described how feeble we are at affective forecasting, the ability to predict how we will be feeling in the future. The impact bias has us think that there will be much more of an impact by both negative and positive events than what we are actually going to feel. Today I have something good to report (although in some ways it is also at the root of why we are not very good at predicting.)

Just as the body has a physiological immune system that works hard to keep us healthy, so has the mind. Our brain works on overdrive, although mostly in non-conscious processes, to help us change our views of the world so that we can feel better about the world in which we find ourselves. In Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert’s term, we synthesize happiness, not just rationalizing the choice we made and the situation we find ourselves in, but experiencing positive affect in our brains for choices we’ve made. Here is a short TED talk that brilliantly explains it (https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?language=en). I promise you’ll be astounded.

So you’ve made a choice, you are stuck with it, your liking increases steadily for the outcome. What if I gave you a chance to re-think your choice, though? You’d think with increasing freedom to choose, things would turn out better. They don’t. You are less happy with what you have if you constantly wonder about the alternatives and question consciously if you made the right decision. Multiple alternatives, in other words, do not only make you potentially indecisive, but they also undermine the psychological immune system that sets in when you are settled with something and try to make the best of it. Work that expands on this paradox of choice and has been much discussed lately is that of Barry Schwartz – it will make you rethink consumerism. More on that tomorrow.

East Coast Nightcap 1 copy

Gilbert’s Harvard experiments, by the way, use art as stimuli, a selection of impressionist prints and choices between prints of photographs taken in a photography course. No wonder I became interested. In general, though, research into happiness is a hot topic in contemporary psychology.

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