THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
In 2006, Schwartz and his colleagues showed that exhaustive searching
might well lead maximizers to make better decisions, but tends to make
them unhappy in the process. Schwartz’s team categorized hundreds of
students as either maximizers or satisficers, based on the answers they
gave to various questions, for example: “when I am in the car listening
to the radio, I often check other stations to see if something better is
playing, even if I am relatively satisfied with what I’m listening to”. By
the following summer, the maximizers had landed jobs that paid twenty
percent more on average than the satisficers’ jobs, but they were less
satisfied with their chosen job, more pessimistic, stressed, tired, anxious,
worried, overwhelmed and depressed.
HEURISTICS AND BIASES
On its own, being swamped with choice wouldn’t be such a dilemma
if only we were rational decision makers. Unfortunately, evidence has
mounted over the last few decades showing that much of our thinking is
clouded by an array of heuristics – mental short cuts – and other biases.
This new perspective on human thinking, much of it based on the work
of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, has challenged the traditional
view of economists that we make decisions largely in our own rational
best interest. Controversies have arisen over how to judge the rationality
or otherwise of these mental habits (after all, who is to say what is an
acceptable level of risk, or a worthwhile reward?), so we should guard
Consumers in the developed world are presented with a bewildering array of
choices.