It’s impossible to be a maximizer about everything. The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of life, rather than merely being resigned to...
Human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price.
Emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.
While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don’t expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that...
When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it’s true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are...
When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of satisficing in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved...
We can mitigate regret by Adopting the standards of a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Reducing the number of options we consider before making a decision. Practicing gratitude for what is good in...
WHEN PEOPLE EVALUATE AN EXPERIENCE, THEY ARE PERFORMING one or more of the following comparisons: Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be Comparing the experience to what they expected...
WE ALL KNOW THAT REGRET CAN MAKE PEOPLE MISERABLE, BUT regret also serves several important functions. First, anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously an...
Twenty-five years ago, economist Tibor Scitovsky explored some of the consequences of the phenomenon of adaptation in his book The Joyless Economy. Human beings, Scitovsky said, want to experience ple...
To understand this, we need to make a distinction between what is good for the individual and what is good for the society as a whole, between the psychology of personal autonomy and the ecology of pe...
This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.
This is postdecision regret, regret that occurs after we’ve experienced the results of a decision. But there is also something called anticipated regret, which rears its head even before a decision is...
There is no more effective way to destroy the leadership potential of young officers and noncommissioned officers than to deny them opportunities to make decisions appropriate for their assignments.
There is an important lesson to be taken from this research on counterfactual thinking, and it’s not that we should stop doing it; counterfactual thinking is a powerful intellectual tool. The lesson i...
There is also an important distinction to be made between upward and downward counterfactuals. Upward counterfactuals are imagined states that are better than what actually happened, and downward coun...
There are some strategies you can use to help you avoid the disappointment that comes from thinking about opportunity costs: Unless you’re truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy. Don’t be...
The young New York immigrant woman from Mexico sitting in a college class in contemporary literature can ask herself, as class discussion of a novel begins, whether she’s going to express her identity...
The trouble was that with all these options available to me now, I was no longer sure that regular jeans were what I wanted. Perhaps the easy fit or the relaxed fit would be more comfortable.
The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.