The survey asked about car radios.
“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.” Agree or disagree, on a scale from 1 to 9.
In November 2001, career offices at 11 American colleges and universities sent students who were just starting their job searches to a website run by three researchers: Sheena Iyengar and Rachael Wells of Columbia Business School and Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College. In all, 548 graduating students answered. The radio question was one of 11 items that measured a habit: whether, in the authors’ terms, you look for the best, or for good enough.
The researchers came back in February 2002, while the students were applying, interviewing and getting offers, and again in May, as they accepted jobs. Fewer answered each time.
The two groups searched differently. Students who scored high on the scale, the “maximizers,” expected to apply for more jobs. At colleges outside the top 15, the typical maximizer planned on 20 applications and the typical satisficer on 10. Maximizers leaned more on career services, published rankings, family advice and comparisons with peers. In February, they agreed more strongly that they often fantasized about jobs quite different from the ones they were pursuing.
It paid. Split at the median, the maximizers’ accepted offers averaged $44,515 a year. The satisficers’ averaged $37,085. The gap held after the researchers controlled for university rank, grades and major. The study did not find that a maximizing tendency significantly predicted how many interviews or offers people got. The difference showed up in pay.
They also felt worse. At every survey, maximizers reported more of the feelings the researchers listed: pessimistic, stressed, tired, anxious, worried, overwhelmed, depressed. Asked in May how satisfied they were with the offer they had accepted, and how confident they were in it, they averaged 7.02 on a 9-point scale. Satisficers averaged 7.58. The difference held with salary controlled. Maximizers also wished more strongly that they had pursued still more options.
The paper, published in Psychological Science in 2006, was titled “Doing Better but Feeling Worse.” Its authors noted that salary was only one measure of how well a job search went. And the data were correlations among the students who kept answering; they could not show what caused what.
Two years later, three researchers at Bowling Green State University and Denison Consulting questioned the yardstick itself. Schwartz’s Maximization Scale, they argued, also tapped indecision, avoidance and emotional instability. With a new scale they built, tested on 191 people, maximizing did not correlate with life dissatisfaction. Aside from being more prone to regret, they wrote, “maximizers are just as happy as satisficers.”
The maximizers came out of the job hunt with offers averaging $7,430 more a year, and, by their own ratings in May, a little less sure they had chosen well.