What's Great About "Good Enough"

The other day, my husband gifted me the luxury of a free Sunday morning, when he volunteered to take our daughter for a swim. I was delighted by the prospect of some quality me-time and decided to spend it on an extended yoga class via my mobile exercise app.

Determined to find the perfect class to energize me for the rest of the day, I started reviewing the options. I filtered for class durations of 60 minutes or longer and was left with 203 different classes. Since I like to challenge myself, I chose a second filter that narrowed it down to classes of intermediate and advanced difficulty. However, the app was still returning 128 results. How to pick the best out of 128?

I began scrolling through detailed class descriptions and lengthy reviews by fellow yogis. I even began googling instructor bios and watched several taster videos. Halfway through my fourth video, I realized that 45 minutes had passed. On my hunt for the very best class, I had run out of time to actually complete one! My obsession with perfection meant that I had ended up missing out on the experience altogether.

Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation?

The perfectionist choice strategy described above is an example of what decision scientists refer to as “maximizing.” It means always searching for the very best option and refusing to settle for anything less than perfect. Many people believe that perfect choices will guarantee happiness, but is this really the case?

The Decision Strategy of “Satisficing”

In today’s performance-orientated society, perfectionism and choice maximization are often valued highly. At school, average “C” grades represent satisfactory outcomes. However, while good enough on paper, they are usually served with a note of disappointment.

Why is it that satisfactory outcomes rarely leave a person actually feeling satisfied?

This is where the notion of “satisficing” comes in. No, “satisficing” is not a typo. It’s the inventive word fusion of “satisfy” and “suffice,” and describes a decision-making approach that involves choosing options that are good enough. The aim of satisficing is to quickly identify an option that fulfills the key criteria. Contrary to maximizing approaches, it does not seek perfection. Indeed, the decision process comes to an end as soon as a satisfactory option has been selected.

Traditionally, satisficing was associated with a lack of skills or laziness of the decision-maker. However, given the ever-increasing number of both decisions and options, the consensus is slowly shifting. Satisficing may, in fact, be a practical approach for dealing with the mammoth task of making choices in a complex world.

“Good enough” Choices: A Thought Experiment

When faced with large numbers of options, a satisficing strategy offers clear benefits of reducing decision effort and speeding up the choice process. But can “good enough” choices really make you happy?

Let’s approach the questions with a little thought experiment. Imagine you are on the hunt for a new, regular breakfast cereal. You have a general preference for crunchy flakes that satisfy your sweet tooth but pack a healthy bit of fiber. You’d also like to find an affordable brand and you’d love it if they used sustainable packaging. You definitely want to avoid raisins or other dried fruit (because, eww), but you are open to a hint of cinnamon or vanilla. Oh, and finally, if the cereal box has to include fun little quizzes or crossword puzzles on the back, that would be an added bonus.

To choose your future go-to brekkie, you could adopt a maximizing strategy. This would involve carefully screening all the shreddies, frosties, crispies, hoops, loops, pops, and snaps in your local cereal aisle. Checking the boxes and ingredients against your preferences could easily take you hours and once you tuck in at home, you might end up disappointed. Perhaps you'd feel like your wet bowl of wheat wasn’t worth the effort? Also, having seen all the other options in the supermarket, you might doubt your choice and think that better options are still out there. Maybe you'd be underwhelmed by the taste, experience a sense of regret, and start blaming yourself for not choosing better.

Alternatively, if you followed a satisficing strategy, you might start by outlining a number of key criteria such as (1) sweet cinnamon taste, (2) whole grain ingredients, and (3) no dried fruit. Then you’d simply pick the first box that fulfills all three conditions.

The resulting choice is unlikely to be as good as a maximizer’s choice. However, you might find it still leaves you feeling happier. Here’s why: Firstly, you might find your effort was well-matched to the relative unimportance of the task. Also, since you didn’t conduct a detailed evaluation of 100+ different cereal types, you'd be less aware of all the different options and more likely to be happy with what you’ve got (ignorance is bliss). Finally, you probably wouldn't be overthinking your choice or doubting yourself to the extent a maximizer would. All in all, you'd be more satisfied and experience less regret.

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Satisficing and Happiness

Much of recent psychology research supports the notion that satisficing has the potential to increase people’s overall happiness with their outcomes.

In a decision study by Schwartz and colleagues, decision maximizers were more prone to comparing themselves with other people, which left them vulnerable to regret over their choices. Similarly, a study on consumer choices about cars and clothes found that perfectionist maximizers experienced more regret after deciding on a purchase. In a more applied study focusing on real-life employment choices, researchers found that while maximizers usually landed more lucrative roles, they often reported lower levels of happiness than those employees who followed a satisficing strategy.

Let me finish by highlighting the importance of context. The relative success of satisficing approaches inevitably depends on the type of decision you are about to make. For example, satisficing appears particularly useful for solving trivial decision challenges such as choosing a yoga class or picking a new cereal brand. In contrast, satisficing may be less appropriate when faced with life-changing dilemmas. For example, rather few people would marry the first person they meet, even if this choice could save them considerable time and effort. After all, you don’t want to waste your life with Prince Ordinary if the ideal match might still be around the corner.

Do you want to learn more about your own decision strategies? Check out this questionnaire on satisficing, maximizing, and regret to get a sense of how you rank.

LinkedIn and Facebook image: Olga Rolenko/Shutterstock