I’m about 3/4 of the way through by Barry Schwartz (video and book excerpt links below), and it’s got me re-thinking the way my decision making habits affect my happiness.
I’ll explain in a minute; first, take the quiz. Rate yourself on a scale of 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree) for each of the following questions.
1. Whenever I’m faced with a choice, I try to imagine what all the other possibilities are, even once that aren’t present at the moment.
2. No matter how satisfied I am with my job, it’s only right for me to be on the lookout for better opportunities.
3. When I am in the car listening to the radio, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing, even if I am relatively satisfied with what I’m listening to.
4. Renting videos is really difficult. I’m always struggling to pick the best one.
5. When shopping, I have a hard time finding clothing that I really love.
6. I’m a big fan of lists that attempt to rank things (the best movies… etc.)
7. I often fantasize about living in ways that are quite different from my actual life.
(Partial survey from the American Psychological Association. Find the complete questionnaire in The Paradox of Choice, pg. 80-81)
Now tally up your scores. Scores closer to 49 indicate you’re a maximizer. That is, you tend to weigh all the options before making a decision, striving for the best possible outcome.
Sounds good, right? But Schwartz and his colleagues have shown that “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.”
Of course, this doesn’t prove that maximization causes unhappiness. Still, Schwartz believes maximization plays a causal role in people’s unhappiness. If he’s right, learning how to satisfice (that is, to settle for good enough and not worry about missing a better option) may be instrumental in finding happiness.
How do we do that? In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be offering some simple daily exercises to help you develop satisficing habits. It’ll be an exploratory process for all of us, since I’m a maximizer myself.
How did you score on the quiz? Were you a maximizer? A satisficer? Right in the middle? Do you agree with Schwartz that it has an impact on your happiness?
(, and from The Paradox of Choice.)
Related Posts:
Letting Go of the Perfect Decision, Part I
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I scored 37. And I have had to learn through all my trials and tribulations that nope, it can’t always be perfect. Sometimes ‘just ok’ is going to have to be good enough. I used to get so strung out over the smallest things. Boy, let me tell you, having a baby changes all that! I still get a bit obsessive over some things; I want my jewelry to be as close to perfect as I can get it, but I don’t obsess over the little things as much as I used to. I mean, 10 years from now if it’s going to make a difference, maybe. But if not, forget about it. Life’s too short to be worrying over what may or may not happen.
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I’m around a 37, too, but I don’t rate that way across the board. When it comes to picking movies or settling on a radio station, I have no problem. It’s much harder to think about what I want to do ‘when I grow up’, etc., but it’s not just the big things that bring out the maximizer in me. Grocery shopping and deciding what to get at a restaurant and throw me into complete mental freeze out, as can clothes shopping {shudder…}
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