Recipes for Adequacy

There are two types of decision makers. Satisficers (yes, satisficers) make a decision once their criteria are met. When they find the hotel or the pasta sauce that has the qualities they want, they’re satisfied. Maximizers want to make the best possible decision. Even if they see a bicycle or a backpack that meets their requirements, they can’t make a decision until they’ve examined every option. Satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers. Maximizers expend more time and energy reaching decisions, and they’re often anxious about their choices. Sometimes good enough is good enough. ~ Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project:  Tip #7 of ‘Ten Tips for Being Happier’

There are inevitable problems with dividing the world up into two kinds of people, yet we do it and often such differentiations can even be insightful. For instance when I asked myself which of these I was, I almost said Satisficer at first because accuracy and adequacy are something of a mantra for me, but then realized that like Hamlet I often will do a lot of maximizing metal wrangling for seeming little positive effect. (I think also wanted to avoid Satisficer because it sounded too much like ‘sacrificer’, but it’s supposed to sound more like ‘suffice’.) Naturally I asked my wife and before I finished reading the above out loud to her she said I was a Maximizer.

Well, after some thought I realized the problem was allowing any person to only be one or the other; obviously we all do a little bit of both, and which we do when probably often depends on how much importance we place on the decision at hand. Yet, I recently store-shopped car seats for a child and checked every available display model for the specific feature I was looking for (maximizing options), but since achieving a certain safety level was my criteria – not the specific feature – I took the first seat I understood to have safety level I wanted (Satisficing). In fact, the item I bought didn’t even have the feature I searched so diligently for, but of course observing me check each model is more externally visible than seeing me check an internal safety standard.

And I think this has some relationship implementation – one variable is the relative importance of any specific choice before us, but then there’s also the kind of criteria we’re looking for. Not only are some desires, goals and standards more abstract than others, but often the available information (and communication) is either lacking or overwhelming. Just as we guess at what the next fitting puzzle piece might look like, so too we guess at how much (and what manner of) resource to spend on guessing in order to be satisfied, content or happy with the results. And while consequentially we’re often just wrong about what is going to work for us, we’re also quite often surprised by just what will work for us – and by what turns out to be more than merely adequate for us.