The Person Who Always Picks the Best Option Is the Most Miserable
Sheena Iyengar ran a study in 2006 following college seniors through job recruitment season. She tracked two groups: students who set out to find the best possible job and students who set out to find a job that was good enough. The maximizers — the best-possible group — did better. They landed jobs with starting salaries averaging 20% higher than the satisficers.
They were also measurably less happy about it.
The satisficers, who had settled for the good-enough job, reported more satisfaction with their outcome, less negative emotion during the process, and higher optimism about their decision than the people who objectively won.
This is the central finding that Barry Schwartz spent much of "The Paradox of Choice" building toward. Being a maximizer isn't ambition. It's a cognitive pattern that makes the good things in your life feel worse than they are.
The 13-Question Test
In 2002, Schwartz and colleagues published the Maximization Scale in "Psychological Science" — a 13-item self-report measure designed to capture the extent to which someone pursues the best possible option. Sample items: "When I watch TV, I channel surf, often scanning through the available options even while attempting to watch one program." "I'm a big fan of lists that rank things (best movies, best players, best novels, etc.)."
The scale wasn't designed to identify ambitious people. It was designed to identify a specific cognitive style: the person who cannot commit to an option without running the comparison against every alternative they can imagine.
High scorers on the scale didn't just make more careful decisions. They reported significantly lower happiness, less satisfaction with life, and higher scores on depression and regret measures — even when they made objectively good choices. The pattern held across decisions that ranged from trivial (which jam to buy) to significant (which career to pursue).
The finding is uncomfortable because the maximizer's behavior looks like conscientiousness from the outside. They do the research. They read the reviews. They don't settle. In a culture that treats thoroughness as a virtue, maximizing looks like doing it right.
What it actually does is keep the decision open past the point when it's useful.
The Regret Engine
Herbert Simon coined the term "satisficing" in 1956 — a combination of "satisfying" and "sufficing" — to describe the decision strategy of choosing the first option that meets a threshold rather than searching for the global optimum. He argued that real human decision-making couldn't achieve true optimization because information is incomplete, time is limited, and cognitive resources are finite. The rational strategy, he said, was to satisfice.
Schwartz's contribution was showing that the choice of strategy isn't just about efficiency — it's about emotional outcome. Maximizers don't just spend more time deciding. They generate more regret.
The mechanism is counterfactual thinking. Once a maximizer has chosen, the unchosen alternatives don't disappear. They sit in memory as vivid, plausible alternatives that were almost selected. Every time the chosen option falls short — the restaurant is mediocre, the job has frustrations, the apartment has a noise problem — the maximizer's brain immediately surfaces the alternatives they could have picked.
Satisficers have a structural advantage here. If you picked the first option that met your threshold, the alternatives were never seriously evaluated. They don't have the same psychological weight. You're not carrying a ranked list of what you almost chose.
The job market study showed this precisely. The maximizers got the better jobs and then spent the recruitment period second-guessing every decision, replaying rejected offers, and wondering whether they'd made the right call — even about offers they'd ultimately declined.
Why Better Feels Worse
There's a specific paradox in the maximizer experience that Schwartz calls "the opportunity cost of opportunity costs." When you have more options, each option you pick comes with a larger set of options you didn't pick. The cost of the unchosen alternatives grows with the size of the choice set.
This is why the expansion of consumer choice over the past 30 years — more streaming options, more jobs on LinkedIn, more partners on dating apps — has not produced a corresponding increase in consumer satisfaction. The opposite has happened. Choice anxiety has increased in proportion to choice availability.
A satisficer sets a standard and stops searching when something meets it. More options don't make this worse — they just mean the threshold is met faster. A maximizer sets a standard of "best" and must search until they've evaluated everything, or accept the uncertainty of having stopped before they found the global optimum. More options make this much worse. The search never definitively ends, which means the discomfort never definitively ends.
The psychologist Amos Tversky documented a related phenomenon: people's evaluation of an outcome is shaped more by what they compare it to than by the outcome itself. A salary of $65,000 feels good or bad depending on whether your comparison is the person earning $55,000 next to you or the person earning $85,000 down the hall. Maximizers construct more vivid comparison sets — they've surveyed the landscape — which means their evaluation of what they chose is always running against a more complete picture of what they could have had.
What Satisficers Know
The practical implication isn't "make worse decisions." It's "define your threshold before you start searching, and honor it when something meets it."
This is harder than it sounds. The threshold-setting step requires knowing what you actually value, not what sounds good in comparison to alternatives. Maximizers often discover their preferences only through the comparison process — which means their preferences are always being updated by the search, which means the search can never really end.
Satisficers set the standard in advance: I'm looking for a job that pays above X, has Y kind of work, and doesn't require Z commute. When one comes up that meets all three, they take it. The comparison set is their threshold, not the market.
The research on satisficing isn't an argument against quality. Schwartz explicitly distinguishes between the maximizer's across-the-board optimization instinct and the legitimate choice to apply maximum scrutiny to things that genuinely matter. The point isn't to satisfice everything — it's to notice where you're applying the maximizer pattern to decisions that don't warrant it, and to understand what that pattern costs you.
The person who reads forty reviews before buying a pair of headphones, spends three weekends comparing apartments before committing to the one they knew they wanted on day one, or runs a five-month job search for a role identical to the one they'd have taken in month two — that person is not being thorough. They're generating a regret engine and setting it running.
Barry Schwartz's own conclusion in the original research was blunt: the secret to happiness is not finding the best option. It's having a standard that tells you when you've found a good one.
The related psychology of why we sabotage decisions we've already made connects to the procrastination literature too — see Procrastination Isn't Laziness.
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