Maximizing vs. Satisficing: Which one are you?

(That is not a typo in the title, don’t worry, I’ll explain.)

I love being a double major. Throughout my course work I have found so many different topics overlap from communications into psychology and vice versa. For my Industrial/Organizational psychology class we had to read a research article I found to be particularly interesting. The article, Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the “Best” job Undermines Satisfaction, was about maximizing and satisficing and how these choice-making strategies can affect general happiness and job performance.
The article defines maximizing as “to seek the best and requires an exhaustive search of all possibilities.” Satisficing is “to seek ‘good enough,’ searching until encountering an option that crosses the threshold of acceptability.” The example used is when watching t.v., maximizers channel surf and look at all the channels, leaving little time to actually watch a show. On the other hand, satisficers would channel surf until he or she found an acceptable show and actually watched said show.

The research led to show that compared with satisficers maximizers do better financially, but feel worse. Maximizers are more unhappy with their choices after they have made them, even if it is a good decision. On the other hand, satisficers are happy and are not just settling. They are falling under what they consider to be an “acceptable threshold.” The article also states that maximizers might act this way because in the past they have been high achievers with past successes and have learned to expect more of themselves.

As the discussion on this article continued in class, we began talking about how this actually applies in the workplace setting and in real life. My professor brought up social media and how maximizers would be on all the different forms of social media and constantly checking the sites, which in the end only leads to unhappiness. This lead me to think about public relations professionals. Could public relations professionals turn off social media for a day and still feel like they are able to complete their tasks for the day or get projects done?

Soon this conversation led to talking about the 40-hour work week and how stress and overworking are socially reinforced constructs in our culture. I remember being in middle school and just doing my homework to get it done so I didn’t have to worry about it anymore. But then I got to high school and suddenly it was “cool” to put off doing work until the last minute so you’re up all night studying or writing a paper. In college it seems as if people are competing for who got less sleep or who has more work to do. My professor made a great point, you never hear anyone say, “You know last night I got a great full nine hours of sleep and I woke up feeling really refreshed and had a great start to my morning and I don’t need any coffee today!”

 

Our culture values spending more time at work and you are considered a better person if you work longer and harder hours. However, working long hours in the long run causes productivity to go down and people are likely to “burn out” faster. This entire discussion gave me a lot to think about for my future career. The public relations world is often never ending, with taking calls and checking emails at home.
It is readings and discussions like these that make me so grateful to be studying both psychology and communications. I feel that having this knowledge about maximizers being unhappy will help me to remember to not become fixated on what could have happened if I had made another choice or picked a different job.

Along with the reading we also had to complete a survey and score ourselves to determine which side of the scale we fall on. The higher the number, the more likely you are to be a maximizer. I scored a 3.5 which I feel is pretty accurate of myself. While I have high standards for myself and work hard, I don’t overstress myself to the point where I am only worrying about the options I should have chosen instead of the one I did choose.

So what do you think you are, a maximizer or satisficer?