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What happens to people who look for and find the best? Well, it’s bad news again. Schwartz, along with two business school professors, did a study of college seniors preparing to enter the workforce.1 For six months the researchers followed the seniors as they applied for and started new jobs. They then classified the students into maximizers (students who were looking for the best job) and satisficers (students who were looking for a job that met certain minimum requirements and was “good enough”).
Here’s what they found: On average, the maximizers put much more time and effort into their job search. They did more research, asked more friends for advice, and went on more interviews. In return, the maximizers in the study got better jobs. They received, on average, a 20 percent higher starting salary than the satisficers.
After they started their jobs, though, Schwartz and his colleagues asked the participants how satisfied they were. What they found was amazing. Even though the maximizers had better jobs than the satisficers, by every psychological measure they felt worse about them. Overall, maximizers had less job satisfaction and were less certain they’d selected the right job at all. The satisficers, by contrast, were generally more positive about their jobs, the search process, and their lives in general.
The satisficers had jobs that paid less money, but they somehow felt better about them.
Searching for a job when you’re in college is hardly a typical situation, so I asked Schwartz if perhaps this study was just capturing something unique. It wasn’t.
Schwartz is an encyclopedia of psychological research on choice problems. If asked to give a quote about him for the back of a book cover, I would say, “This motherfucker knows choice.”
As he explained it, the maximizers in the job-search experiment were doing what maximizers generally do: Rather than compare actual jobs, with their various pros and cons, in their minds they wound up selecting the features of each particular job and creating a “fantasy job,” an ideal that neither they nor, probably, anyone else would ever get.
Johnny Satisficer is sitting around at his dum-dum job, eating his disgusting subpar taco and thinking about hanging his generic Christmas ornaments later on. But he’s totally happy about that.
Meanwhile, I’ve just found out the taco place I researched for hours is closed on Sundays, and even though this year I have my dope Christmas ornaments, I’m worried there’s a better Christmas ornament out there that I don’t know about yet and am spending my holidays with the Internet instead of my family.
THE PARADOX OF CHOICE IN RELATIONSHIPS
When applied to modern romance, the implications of these ideas on choice are slightly terrifying.
If we are the generation with the greatest set of options, what happens to our decision making? By Schwartz’s logic, we are probably looking for “the best” and, in fact, we are looking for our soul mates too. Is this possible to find? “How many people do you need to see before you know you’ve found the best?” Schwartz asked. “The answer is every damn person there is. How else do you know it’s the best? If you’re looking for the best, this is a recipe for complete misery.”
Complete misery! (Read in a scary Aziz whisper voice.)*
If you are in a big city or on an online dating site, you are flooded with options. Seeing all these options, like the people in the job example, are we now comparing our potential partners not to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person whom no one could measure up to?
And what if you’re not looking for your soul mate yet but just want to date someone and commit to a girlfriend or boyfriend? How does our increase in options affect our ability to commit? To be honest, even picking lunch in Seattle was pretty tough.
If we, like the people in the job study, are creating a “fantasy” person full of all our desired qualities, doesn’t the vast potential of the Internet and all our other romantic pools give us the illusion that this fantasy person does, in fact, exist? Why settle for anything less?
When we brought these ideas up in focus groups, people responded to these notions immediately. In the city with arguably the most options, New York City, people discussed how it was hard to settle down because every corner you turned revealed more potential opportunities.
I’ve felt it myself. For much of the past few years, I split my time between New York and L.A. When I first started dating my current girlfriend, when I was in New York, I’d see people everywhere and feel like, Shit, should I ever take myself out of the single world? There’s so many people! Then I got back to L.A., where instead of walking in streets and subway stations full of potential options, I would be alone in my Prius filled with shitty gasoline, listening to a dumb podcast. I couldn’t wait to get home and hold my girlfriend.