If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it.
In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing.
But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all.
There’s a better way to make decisions. To understand it, you should know about Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, as well as a Nobel laureate in economics.
Simon demonstrated that for most decisions, humans can’t really evaluate the options available — there are too many, our information about them is incomplete, and our minds aren’t built to weigh them all — and so we rely on mental shortcuts. He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how we consider a limited set of options, then choose one that is good enough and move on to live our lives.
When Simon faced a decision, he considered a few alternatives, sometimes asked for advice, chose and moved on. He didn’t agonize, and he didn’t second-guess. “The best is enemy of the good” was the mantra he lived by.
Simon was, as he put it, an “incorrigible satisficer.” His eldest daughter, Katherine, recalled that he wore one brand of socks to avoid selecting color or style each morning, and owned exactly one black beret at a time, made at a particular haberdashery in Europe.
According to Katherine, he said that one needed only three sets of clothes: “one on one’s body, one in the wash and one in the closet ready to wear.” He always ate the same breakfast — oatmeal, half a grapefruit, black coffee — and lived in the same house for 46 years.
“My father simplified his life in terms of his daily habits,” Katherine wrote, “thus eliminating the need to make little decisions about everything.” By taking the small decisions off his plate, that simplification freed his attention for the people and work that actually mattered to him.
The mathematician John Allen Paulos illustrated the same principle with a thought experiment, in his 1988 book “Innumeracy”: How should you choose your final romantic partner? First, he argued, you should estimate the number of people you might plausibly date in your lifetime. Then date roughly the first third with no intention of committing. Use that time purely to calibrate what you liked, what you didn’t like and what you might be missing.
After that, commit to the very next person you like better than everyone you’ve already dated. Paulos was illustrating a well-known result in probability, which shows that this rule gives you the best chance of ending up with the best partner in the whole sequence. Keep pushing past that point, and you’re more likely to end up with a worse match, or no one at all. The core insight — that the path to the best outcome runs directly through the willingness to stop searching long before you’ve exhausted the options — extends far beyond dating.
Psychologists who followed up on Simon’s work have shown that his personal philosophy was both efficient and wise. Shortly after Simon’s death in 2001, a team of researchers created a “maximization scale” to measure where a person falls on the spectrum between maximizer and satisficer. They found that it’s usually bad to be a maximizer.
Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term “flow,” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”
This is critical today because chronic maximizing has never been easier. In 2006, an economist calculated that the consumer options available to citizens of modern economies exceed those of preindustrial societies roughly by a factor of 100 million. That is an almost incomprehensible multiplication of choice, and it extends well beyond consumer goods into questions of who to be, how to live, where to work and whom to love.
Social media has intensified the problem by functioning as an infinite comparison engine. When you can see a curated highlight reel of everyone else’s career, relationship, home and vacation, the very concept of “good enough” begins to feel like settling.
The pull to keep searching for something better has poisoned even the most mundane moments. Research shows that giving viewers many videos to flip between makes them more bored than if they focus on just one. One way to interpret the findings is that the mere notion that something better might be out there spoils the moment.
Studies in the United States and China show that since about 2010, young people have reported becoming increasingly bored. Dating apps have offered a version of Mr. Paulos’s thought experiment, with users forever wondering what might be beyond that next swipe — maximizing in its purest form.
And now artificial intelligence promises to help us optimize everything: our schedules, our diets, our wardrobes, our creative output. If Simon was right, the a hidden danger of these tools is that they will expand the menu of options and comparisons even further.
The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami captured the maximizer’s tragedy in a short story. A lonely boy and girl meet on a street corner and intuitively recognize that they are the perfect match for each other. It’s a miracle. They hold hands and talk for hours. But then a sliver of doubt creeps in: “Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?” They decide on a test. If they truly are perfect for each other, they can part and will inevitably meet again. Then they’ll know for sure. The boy walks off to the west, and the girl to the east. They really were perfect for each other. Years later, they pass in the street, but their memories have faded. They never meet again.
Simon would not have been surprised they never met again. Whether you’re searching for a dishwasher or a date, set a good-enough standard. Stop when it’s met. Save your cognitive resources for things that matter.
David Epstein is the author of, most recently, “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” and “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”
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