The Paradox of Choice Read online

  Does it follow that maximizers are less happy than satisficers? We tested this idea by having the same people who filled out the Maximization Scale fill out a variety of other questionnaires that have been shown over the years to be reliable indicators of well-being. One questionnaire measured happiness. A sample item from that questionnaire asked people to rate themselves on a scale that went from “not a very happy person” to “a very happy person.” Another questionnaire measured optimism. A sample item asked people how much they agreed that “in uncertain times, I usually expect the best.” Another questionnaire was the Satisfaction with Life Scale. A sample item asked people how much they agreed that “the conditions of my life are excellent.” A final questionnaire measured depression, and asked people how sad they felt, how much satisfaction they got out of various activities, how much interest they had in other people, and what they thought of their appearance, among other things.

  Our expectation was confirmed: people with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores. In fact, people with extreme maximization scores—scores of 65 or more out of 91—had depression scores that placed them in the borderline clinical depression range.

  But I need to emphasize one important caveat: What these studies show is that being a maximizer is correlated with being unhappy. They do not show that being a maximizer causes unhappiness, because correlation does not necessarily indicate cause and effect. Nonetheless, I believe that being a maximizer does play a causal role in people’s unhappiness, and I believe that learning how to satisfice is an important step not only in coping with a world of choice but in simply enjoying life.

  Maximizing and Regret

  MAXIMIZERS ARE MUCH MORE SUSCEPTIBLE THAN SATISFICERS TO all forms of regret, especially that known as “buyer’s remorse.” If you’re a satisficer and you choose something that’s good enough to meet your standards, you are less likely to care if something better is just around the corner. But if you’re a maximizer, such a discovery can be a source of real pain. “If only I had gone to one more store.” “If only I had read Consumer Reports.” “If only I had listened to Jack’s advice.” You can generate if only’s indefinitely, and each one you generate will diminish the satisfaction you get from the choice you actually made.

  It’s hard to go through life regretting every decision you make because it might not have been the best possible decision. And it’s easy to see that if you experience regret on a regular basis, it will rob you of at least some of the satisfaction that your good decisions warrant. What is even worse is that you can actually experience regret in anticipation of making a decision. You imagine how you’ll feel if you discover that there was a better option available. And that leap of imagination may be all it takes to plunge you into a mire of uncertainty—even misery—over every looming decision.

  I will have much more to say about regret in Chapter 7, but for now, let’s take a look at another scale we developed in conjunction with our Maximization Scale to measure regret.

  To score yourself on this scale, just put a number from 1 (“Disagree Completely”) to 7 (“Agree Completely”) next to each question. Then subtract from 8 the number you put next to the first question, and add the result to the other numbers. The higher your score, the more susceptible you are to regret.

  Our findings with the Regret Scale have been dramatic. Almost everyone who scores high on the Maximization Scale also scores high on regret.

  * * *

  REGRET SCALE

  Once I make a decision, I don’t look back.

  Whenever I make a choice, I’m curious about what would have happened if I had chosen differently.

  If I make a choice and it turns out well, I still feel like something of a failure if I find out that another choice would have turned out better.

  Whenever I make a choice, I try to get information about how the other alternatives turned out.

  When I think about how I’m doing in life, I often assess opportunities I have passed up.

  (Courtesy of American Psychological Association)

  * * *

  Maximizing and the Quality of Decisions

  OUR STUDIES SHOW THAT MAXIMIZERS PAY A SIGNIFICANT PRICE IN terms of personal well-being. But does their quest for perfection lead, at least, to better decisions? Since maximizers have higher standards than satisficers, one would think that they end up with better things. The “best” apartment is better than a “good enough” apartment. The “best” job is better than the “good enough” job. And the “best” romantic partner is better than the “good enough” romantic partner. How could it be otherwise?

  The answer is complicated. Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively. Imagine a maximizer who succeeds in buying a sweater after an extensive search—a better sweater than any but the luckiest satisficer would end up with. How does he feel about the sweater? Is he frustrated at how much time and work went into buying it? Is he imagining unexamined alternatives that might be better? Is he asking himself whether friends of his might have gotten better deals? Is he scrutinizing every person he passes in the street to see if they’re wearing sweaters that look finer? The maximizer might be plagued by any or all of these doubts and concerns while the satisficer marches on in warmth and comfort.

  So we have to ask ourselves what counts when we assess the quality of a decision. Is it objective results or subjective experiences? What matters to us most of the time, I think, is how we feel about the decisions we make. When economists theorize about how consumers operate in the market, they assume that people seek to maximize their preferences, or their satisfaction. What becomes clear about “satisfaction” or “preferences” as they are experienced in real life is that they are subjective, not objective. Getting the best objective result may not be worth much if we feel disappointed with it anyway.

  But while this subjective satisfaction scale may work for trivial decisions, when it comes to important life issues—education, for instance—isn’t objective quality all that matters? No, I don’t think so. I have interacted with college students for many years as a professor, and in my experience, students who think they’re in the right place get far more out of a particular school than students who don’t. Conviction that they have found a good fit makes students more confident, more open to experience, and more attentive to opportunities. So while objective experience clearly matters, subjective experience has a great deal to do with the quality of that objective experience.

  Which is not to say that students who are satisfied with bad colleges will get a good education, or that patients who are satisfied with incompetent doctors will not suffer in the end. But remember, I’m not saying that satisficers do not have standards. Satisficers may have very high standards. It’s just that they allow themselves to be satisfied once experiences meet those standards.

  Following Herbert Simon’s reasoning, some might argue that my description of maximizers is actually a description of people who don’t truly understand what it means to “maximize.” A real maximizer would figure in the costs (in time and money and stress) of gathering and assessing information. An exhaustive search of the possibilities, which entails enormous “information costs,” is not the way to maximize one’s investment. The true maximizer would determine just how much information seeking was the amount needed to lead to a very good decision. The maximizer would figure out when information seeking had reached the point of diminishing returns. And at that point, the maximizer would stop the search and choose the best option.

  But maximizing is not a measure of efficiency. It is a state of mind. If your goal is to get the best, then you will not be comfortable with compromises dictated by the constraints imposed by reality. You will not experience the kind of satisfaction with your choices that satisficers will. In every area of life, you will always be open to the possibility that you might fin
d something better if you just keep looking.

  Maximizing and Perfectionism

  WHEN WE GO BEYOND CONSUMPTION AND INTO THE REALMS OF performance, it’s important to distinguish between what we mean by “maximizers” and what describes “perfectionists.” We have given some of the respondents who filled out our Maximization Scale a scale to measure perfectionism, and we have found that, while responses on the two scales are correlated, maximizing and perfectionism are not interchangeable.

  A perfectionist is not satisfied doing a “good enough” job if he or she can do better. A musician keeps practicing and practicing a piece even after she has reached a level of performance that virtually everyone in the audience will regard as flawless. A top student keeps revising a paper long past the point where it is good enough to get an A. Tiger Woods works tirelessly on his game long after he has attained excellence that no one had previously thought possible. When it comes to achievement, being a perfectionist has clear advantages.

  Thus perfectionists, like maximizers, seek to achieve the best. But I think there is an important difference between them. While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don’t expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that they do expect to meet.

  Which may explain why we found that those who score high on perfectionism, unlike maximizers, are not depressed, regretful, or unhappy. Perfectionists may not be as happy with the results of their actions as they should be, but they seem to be happier with the results of their actions than maximizers are with the results of theirs.

  When Do Maximizers Maximize?

  I AM NOT A MAXIMIZER. WHEN I ANSWERED THE QUESTIONNAIRE ON maximizing, I scored less than 20. I hate to shop and when I have to, I can’t wait to get it over with. I stick to the brands I know and do my best to ignore new choices on the market. I pay scant attention to my investments. I don’t worry about whether I’m getting the best rates from my long-distance company. I stick to old versions of computer software for as long as I can. And in my work, while I do adhere to very high standards, I don’t expect to attain perfection. When I think a paper I’m writing or a class I’m preparing is good enough, I go on to something else. Perhaps if I spent some more time looking for better deals, I’d have more money. If I spent more time on my work, perhaps I’d be a better teacher. But I accept these “losses.”

  Nonetheless, like practically everyone else, I have my own select areas in which I tend to maximize. When I go into one of those fancy stores that sells elegantly prepared takeout foods or to a social gathering that offers a buffet that looks like it was prepared for Gourmet magazine, I look at the wide variety of delicious foods, and I want them all. I can imagine what they all taste like, and I want to experience each one. So I find myself reluctant to make a decision. As a maximizer in this regard, I experience many of the problems I’ve been talking about in this chapter. When I finally make a choice, I think about the items I’ve passed up. I second-guess myself, and I often regret my decision, not because it turns out badly, but because I suspect that a different decision might have turned out better. In restaurants, I have difficulty ordering, and then I look at food being brought out to other diners, and not infrequently conclude that they ordered more wisely than I did. All of which clearly diminishes the satisfaction I get from the choices I actually make.

  You may not be a picky eater, but you may spend months looking for the right stereo system. You may not care about clothes, but you will put your heart and soul into buying the best possible car you can afford. There are people who care desperately about maximizing their returns on investments even if they don’t want to spend their money on anything in particular. The truth is that maximizing and satisficing orientations tend to be “domain specific.” Nobody is a maximizer in every decision, and probably everybody is in some. Perhaps what distinguishes maximizers from satisficers is the range and number of decisions in which an individual operates as one or the other.

  This is good news, because what it means is that most of us have the capacity to be satisficers. The task, then, for someone who feels overwhelmed by choices, is to apply the satisficing strategy more often, letting go of the expectation that “the best” is attainable.

  Maximizing and the Choice Problem

  FOR A MAXIMIZER, THE OVERLOAD OF CHOICE I DISCUSSED IN CHAPTERS 1 and 2 is a nightmare. But for a satisficer, it does not have to be such a burden. In fact, the more options there are, the more likely it is that the satisficer will find one that meets his or her standards. Adding options doesn’t necessarily add much work for the satisficer, because the satisficer feels no compulsion to check out all the possibilities before deciding.

  A friend of mine has two daughters who provide a case in point.

  When the older girl entered adolescence, my friend and his wife experienced the usual parent-versus-adolescent struggles for control. Often, the battles with their daughter were about buying clothes. Their daughter was style conscious and had expensive taste, and her ideas about what she absolutely “needed” differed from her parents’. Then my friend and his wife had an idea. They negotiated a clothing allowance with their daughter, allocating funds for a reasonable number of reasonably priced items in the various categories of clothes. They gave her a lump sum, and she could then decide for herself how to spend it. It worked like a charm. Arguments about clothing stopped, and my friends were able to spend the rest of their daughter’s adolescence fighting with her about more important things.

  The couple were so pleased with the results of their strategy that they did the same thing with their younger daughter. However, the two girls are very different people. The older one is a satisficer, while the younger one is a maximizer (at least with regard to clothing). What this meant was that the older girl could take her clothing allowance, buy things she liked, often on impulse, and never worry about alternatives that she was passing up. This was not so easy for the younger daughter. Each shopping trip was accompanied by anguish about whether purchasing this or that item was really the best thing to do with her money. Would she regret having purchased this item two months later, when the seasons and styles changed? This was too much to ask of a twelve-year-old. Giving her all this freedom was not doing her an unalloyed favor. I suspect that she isn’t sorry that she had this freedom to make her own decisions, but her “clothing liberation” provided her with much worry and little joy.

  Why Would Anyone Maximize?

  THE DRAWBACKS OF MAXIMIZING ARE SO PROFOUND AND THE BENEFITS so tenuous that we may well ask why anyone would pursue such a strategy. The first explanation is that many maximizers may not be aware of this tendency in themselves. They might be aware that they have trouble making decisions and that they fear they will regret decisions and that they often derive little lasting satisfaction from the decisions they have made, but all with no conscious awareness of what is at the root of the problem.

  The second explanation is our concern with status. People have undoubtedly cared about status for as long as they have lived in groups, but status concern has taken on a new form in our time. In an era of global telecommunications and global awareness, only “the best” assures success in a competition against everybody else. With increased affluence, increased materialism, modern marketing techniques, and a stunning amount of choice thrown into the mix, it seems inevitable that concern for status would explode into a kind of arms race of exquisiteness. The only way to be the best is to have the best.

  There’s another dimension to the modern concern for status, identified thirty years ago by economist Fred Hirsch. He wrote about goods that were inherently scarce or whose value depended in part on their scarcity. Parcels of land on the ocean cannot be increased. Spots in the entering class at Harvard cannot be expanded. Access to the very best medical facilities cannot be made more plentiful. Suburban housing can be made more plentiful, but only by putting houses closer together or building farther away from t
he city, thereby negating much that makes them desirable. Technological innovation may enable us to feed more and more people with an acre of land, but it won’t enable us to provide more and more people with an acre of land, near where they work, to live on. Hirsch suggested that the more affluent a society becomes, and the more basic material needs are met, the more people care about goods that are inherently scarce. And if you’re in competition for inherently scarce goods, “good enough” is never good enough; only the best—only maximization—will do.

  So it is possible that some people are aware of the negative side of being maximizers, but that they feel compelled by circumstance to be maximizers nonetheless. They might prefer a world in which there was less pressure on them to get and do the best, but that’s not the world they inhabit.

  Does Choice Create Maximizers?

  WHAT I WANT TO EXPLORE FINALLY IS WHETHER THE PROLIFERATION of choices might make someone a maximizer. My experience buying jeans suggests that this is a possibility. As I indicated earlier, prior to that bewildering shopping trip, I didn’t care very much about which jeans I bought. I especially didn’t care very much about subtleties of fit. Then I found out that there were several different varieties, each designed to produce a different fit, available to me. Suddenly, I cared. I hadn’t been turned into a “denim maximizer” by the availability of options, but I had certainly been nudged in that direction. My standards for buying jeans had been altered—forever.

  Throughout this chapter, I have been talking about maximizing and the number of options people face as if the two were independent of each other. The world offers a wide range of options, and something (presently unknown) creates maximizers, and then the two combine to make people unhappy with their decisions. But it is certainly possible that choice and maximizing are not independent of each other. It is possible that a wide array of options can turn people into maximizers. If this is true, then the proliferation of options not only makes people who are maximizers miserable, but it may also make people who are satisficers into maximizers.