Maximizing vs. Satisficing
A friend recently introduced me to the concept of “familect”, which, as the name suggests, refers to a set of words or phrases that are only used and understood within a small, tight-knit group or family.
Literally a “family dialect”.
He rattled off a couple examples that I certainly hadn’t heard before, but I struggled to think of even one.
The closest I came up with was the concept of Maximizer and Satisfices.
Strictly speaking, Maximizers and Satisficers don’t qualify because I’m sure they came to my family through the Wall Street Journal Review section, so at least tens or hundreds of thousands of people also know the concept (and who knows how long they were floating around before the WSJ caught wind of them.
We certainly can’t claim sole ownership, but it feels like it belongs in the familect neighborhood because I’ve never heard anyone else get such use out of the concept as my family.
If you weren’t reading the WSJ ten years ago, don’t worry.
I’ll catch you up.
There are two types of people, Maximizers and Satisficers.
When making a decision, Maximizers attempt to find the optimal solution, while Satisficers (a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice) search the solution space until they find an adequate solution.
To use a concrete example, consider buying a new backpack.
You may have preferences about color, size, durability, and which types of pockets are more important to you.
A Maximizer might do extensive research, read blogs and reviews, and browse a lot of online and brick-and-mortar stores to determine which backpack best matched their preferences.
A Satisficer, on the other hand, would probably scroll through Amazon to get a feel for prices, check out a few reviews to make sure the zipper won’t break immediately, them buy the first one that looks ok.
One reason these categories resonted so well with my family is that most of us happen to fall neatly into one group or the other.
However, like any dichotomy, most people fall somewhere in the middle, between Platonic Maximizer and Platonic Satisficer.
The spectrum can be thought of as the threshold at which a solution becomes adequate.
In most real-life decisions, it is infeasible to explore the entire solution space (not to mention uncertainty about explorable solutions).
In the backpack example, it is impossible to find all the backpacks available, so everyone employs some adequacy threshold.
Whether that threshold is top 5% or top 50% of solutions determines where on the spectrum a person falls.
Furthermore, this is highly domain specific.
That is, one person might care a lot about what backpack they have but not care much about the food they eat.
Another person might Maximize for enjoying their food, but Satisfice on choosing where to live.
Apparently (read: according to my sister (See appendix), Maximizers are happier than Satisficers.
This is not obvious, at least not to me.
Obviously, if your adequacy thresholds are too low, you will make bad decisions and be less happy than someone who Maximizes more.
On the other hand, if your adequacy threshold is too high, you may spend too long making decisions.
You may have more doubts about your decisions even if they are objectively better.
I’m going to make my escape now before I get into the weeds of meta-deciding how much effort to put into your other decisions.
If you’re interested, feel free to contact me with your thoughts on Maximizing and Satisficing, any familect you think more people should know about, or anything else that interests you.
Appendix (Nov. 6, 2022)
My sister has since informed me that I have this exactly backwards, and I apologize for making her look like a fool who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Satisficers tend to be happier than Maximizers.
I’ll avoid giving some explanation because this is exactly what is wrong with social science and why people need to preregister their studies.
I will say that I find it hilarious that, even though I got the result wrong, the correct result was more intuitive to me.