The Quick Choice Might be a Choice-Overload Avoidance Strategy
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
The quick choice might be a choice-overload avoidance strategy:
A popular streaming service boasts a film inventory approaching 4,000 titles. When it's time to pick a movie, are you more likely to quickly make a decision or meticulously sift through the possibilities?
Psychologists refer to those who search minimally for something to arrive at an adequate choice as "satisficers." It's the "maximizers," meantime, who search exhaustively for what might be considered as the perfect option.
[...] "We might assume maximizers are having a negative experience in the moment, obsessing over the perfect choice. But it appears to be the satisficers -- and that might be why they're satisficing," says Thomas Saltsman, a psychology researcher in the UB College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's lead author. "We found evidence that compared to maximizers, satisficers exhibited cardiovascular threat responses consistent with evaluating themselves as less capable of managing their choice in the moment."
The findings, published in the journal Psychophysiology, break with traditional wisdom. The implications are relevant not just to everyday decision making, but speak as well to how people approach significant choices, according to Mark Seery, an associate professor of psychology at UB, and one of the paper's co-authors.
"Anyone who has had the experience of maximizing and thought about the energy and stress saved by satisficing might want to rethink that position," says Seery. "There's a time and a place for satisficing, but people who do so as a defense against the agony of choice might not be prepared to make critical decisions when they have to."
Journal Reference:
Thomas L. Saltsman, Mark D. Seery, Deborah E. Ward, et al. Is satisficing really satisfying? Satisficers exhibit greater threat than maximizers during choice overload, Psychophysiology (DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13705)
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