Saturday, October 15, 2011

Junot Diaz Challenge (100 Books in a year): #4

Advice to Satisfice

In America, if you put your mind to it, you can have anything you want; you just can't have everything you want. -Bernard Baruch  

Book 4 was a treat. Some of the most interesting topics included discussions of questions like: If choice and money are supposed to bring happiness, why hasn't general well-being risen over the last thirty years concomitantly with the significant increases in choice (in our market economy) and GDP?

Schwartz is not the first person to discuss this problem, but his answer is perhaps unique. He arguses that most of our unhappiness comes from too much freedom to choose in areas that are not worth spending time choosing. In particular, when given more choices, we tend to spend more time thinking about our options. This can have unintended negative consequences: we spend longer choosing and not doing the things we really love (opportunity costs); we do mental acrobatics which cost us emotionally as we weigh the options which can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction before and after (anxiety about a bad choice and later, buyers' remorse) our choice; we fall into the trap of believing that materialistic goals can lead to happiness (hedonic treadmill); and by considering more choices, the thing we ultimately choose will necessarily, be a decision not to choose others (we can't have it all) and our choice will suffer by comparison at least in one regard, if not many.

As you might expect, there are others who have thought about how people find happiness, and there has been lots of research on this subject. Nobel Laureate, Herb Simon first coined the portmanteau "satisfice," an amalgam of satisfy and suffice, which describes the strategy of choosing that which is "good enough" as opposed to "the best." Herb Simon suggests that when all the opportunity costs (time spent), real costs (money) and emotional costs (anguish) are considered, satisficing is generally the maximizal strategy. The best solution to (interesting) problems are solutions that are sufficient and satisfactory; they are NOT the objective "best" solution.

Schwartz has identified through his "Maximization scale" (a quiz you can take in the book) who among us are likely to be maximizers and who are satisficers. Furthermore, he finds that satisficers tend to regret their decisions less and enjoy life more, and more worryingly, an abundance of choice can turn a perfectly happy satisficer into a maximizer. If Simon and Schwartz are right, it behooves us to work to become better satisficers and be vigilant against too much choice leading us down the maximization road.

For people like me, who spend so much time thinking about the big decisions: marriage, career, religion, or which stereo to buy, this is welcome advice. I look forward to constraining my decisions in the future to two choices at most (one of the recommendations Schwartz suggests among other good ones in the last chapter of his book). If the options represent satisficing solutions to a given problem, then I can feel comfortable going forward with the one I choose. Philosophically, with the really big problems I have found that I can ameliorate my anxiety about not getting everything in life by appealing to the possibility that all universes exist and my observations are confined to the me living out the (admittedly wonderful, yet contingent) life I have in this universe.

There is an excellent and very watchable animated lecture on motivation that square with the work of Schwartz (and the research he cites) that provides a fuller understanding of why we are not satisfied with material goods. The lecture is given by Dan Pink, another popularizer of scientific research done on motivation, and author of the book Drive, which may be a future blog post. I encourage you to watch this video! In retrospect, this crisis of motivation was a big reason for why I left my job in the financial world.

Finally, if this work interests you and you want to read more, check out Ed Diener's and his son's, Robert Biswas-Diener's, work on subjective well-being (Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being). The Dieners' are leaders in this field of work and they have many interesting things to say. For example, they have found that the extent to which a person preferences love to money is correlated with subjective well-being.

There are good, subtle arguments in the link above regarding considerations whether the causality flowing in both directions (if am satisfied with my life, might I be more likely to be a good mate choice and thus preference love to money; similarly, if I am not satisfied with my life, might I believe that I can solve my problems by focusing on money?).

Much of this work is interesting and of course we cannot read it all; I hope that my summary has been satisfycing for you.

1 comment:

  1. I think there's something to this strain of choice idea! Recently, when I'm stressed out trying to make a decision, I only do well when I look for the one important factor/reason instead of adding up the pros and cons.

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