Cobra Effect · Decisions and strategy
Satisficing
Good enough, chosen quickly, often beats the endless hunt for best.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:33, with a test and sources.
You need a new kettle. Two hours later you are still reading reviews.
There are four hundred kettles. Somewhere among them is the best one for you. You could find it, if you read every review and compared every spout. Or you could boil some water.
Herbert Simon, 1956. Nobody actually chooses the best.
Simon, who later won a Nobel prize in economics, thought the textbook chooser was a fiction. Real people have limited time, limited attention and limited information. So they do something else. They set a threshold, and take the first option that clears it. He needed a word for it, and made one from satisfy and suffice.
That is satisficing.
Decide what good enough means before you look. Look until you find it. Then stop. It is not laziness. It is the only strategy that fits a mind that cannot hold four hundred kettles. Simon called the whole picture bounded rationality, and it changed how economists think about people.
Barry Schwartz asked who is happier. It was not the maximisers.
In 2002 Schwartz and colleagues sorted people into maximisers, who must have the best, and satisficers, who want good enough. Maximisers were less happy, less optimistic, and more prone to regret. A 2006 study followed graduating students into their job hunts. The maximisers landed jobs paying about 20% more. And felt worse about them.
The best is expensive to find and disappointing to own.
Every option you rejected becomes a comparison you can make later. The more you looked, the more you can imagine having chosen instead. A satisficer compares the kettle to the standard. It passed. A maximiser compares it to four hundred others. Something always looks better.
Write down good enough before you start looking.
Three things it must do. One price it must not pass. Take the first option that clears the bar, and stop looking. Save the searching for the few choices that are hard to reverse. For everything else, good enough, found quickly, is the best there is.
Sources
- Satisficing, Wikipedia. Simon’s 1956 paper Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment, the word’s origin in satisfy and suffice, and where the idea went afterwards.
- The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz, 2004. Why more options make people less happy, and the maximiser and satisficer studies that showed it. Schwartz’s conclusion is that satisficing is the strategy that actually maximises.
- Bounded rationality, Wikipedia. Simon’s wider idea. People choose with limited time, information and attention, and the theory of choice should start from there.
Nearby ideas
- The sunk cost fallacy. Money already spent is gone, so it should not steer the next choice.
- Parkinson’s law. Work expands to fill the time you give it.
- Loss aversion. Losing something hurts about twice as much as gaining it pleases.
- Schelling points. Without talking, people meet at whatever stands out.
- Two-way doors. Decide reversible things fast, and save care for what you cannot undo.
- The Pareto principle. A few causes usually produce most of the results.
- The Eisenhower matrix. Urgent things crowd out important ones unless you protect them.
- Hofstadter’s law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you allow for that.