The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 17, 2025


How Do You Approach Life？ Are You a Maximizer or a Satisficer？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_919)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Barry Schwartz Sonia Lubomirsky John Monterosso Catherine Watt Richard Sejan Darren Lehman Andre Ward Elisa Eba
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Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

149.32

Word count

996

Sentence count

47


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Ghasad talks about a personality trait that is relevant to decision making and happiness. He discusses it in his new book, "The Paradox of Choice" and in a paper he published in 2009 in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 Hi everybody, this is Gadsad. One of the beautiful things about being an interdisciplinary researcher is that I can link various concepts and theories and disciplines that heretofore might not have been thought as relevant to each other.
00:00:21.080 So a few days ago, I was reading, going through this book, which I recently bought at a used bookstore in Chicago.
00:00:32.100 You might remember I gave a lecture at the University of Chicago, a wonderful event.
00:00:37.140 So this is the book, a biography on Ludwig von Mises, one of the OGs of the Austrian School of Economics.
00:00:46.780 And I was lamenting online that, you know, as much as I was excited to read the book, I found it quite difficult to read because, you know, it's full of very obscure, arcane references to all sorts of things that you would have to go and find out what he's talking about there in order to fully understand that particular sentence.
00:01:09.660 And I'm almost finished with the book, but at one point I thought to myself, well, you know, let's suppose that there is a hundred things that, you know, if I understood every single word of the book, it would be a hundred.
00:01:25.820 What if I understood only 40% of the 100?
00:01:30.400 There are two ways to look at it.
00:01:32.640 Being the maladaptive perfectionist that I am, I need to understand every syllable of every word.
00:01:39.480 A more forgiving way to look at it would be to say, well, listen, even if I understood or took away 40%, 60%, 80% of what I should take away from this book, that's still a much higher number than zero, which is not the way my brain works.
00:01:57.120 Because again, I am someone who is a perfectionist, I want to understand every syllable of every word, I want to check every syllable, every comma of anything that I write and so on, which then got me to thinking about a personality trait that's very relevant in decision making, but is also related to happiness, which I have cited in my own work, both, I've talked about it in the happiness book, my latest book.
00:02:24.980 And also, I discussed it in a paper that I published with two of my former graduate students, Elisa Eba and Richard Sejan.
00:02:37.240 It was a paper that I published in 2009 in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
00:02:42.460 So what is this trait in question?
00:02:45.020 So Barry Schwartz and his colleagues, Barry Schwartz is a psychologist, he developed a scale known as the maximizing versus satisficing scale, not satisfying, satisficing.
00:03:00.780 To satisfy means to say it's good enough.
00:03:03.800 So there are some people who are maximizers.
00:03:06.300 So for example, if you're searching for information, you want to search for as much information as possible to make sure that you pick the best choice possible.
00:03:15.960 A satisficer will say, well, as long as it meets some minimal requirements, I'll take the first alternative that meets those requirements.
00:03:23.620 So it may not be, you know, the best possible one of all within the set that you might be considering in terms of options.
00:03:31.760 But it is one that satisfies your aspirations, which, by the way, so let me just mention the paper in question.
00:03:39.640 This is a paper that was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Barry Schwartz, Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Sonia Lubomirsky, who is a happiness researcher.
00:03:53.160 I reached out to her, I reached out to her once, I'll leave it at that.
00:03:58.700 Catherine White and Darren Lehman, published in 2002, volume 83, number five.
00:04:06.420 I'll put a link to it in the description of this episode.
00:04:11.660 And so there they actually developed a scale that captures whether you're a maximizer or a satisficer.
00:04:18.180 And it turns out, as you may, might not surprise you, that if you score high on maximizing, it correlates with perfectionism.
00:04:30.200 They're not quite the same construct, but you could imagine why they would be correlated.
00:04:35.740 By the way, this is a book, Barry Schwartz owes me here, I'm plugging all his work.
00:04:40.540 This is a book, an excellent book, that certainly is the type of stuff that I would be teaching in a course in psychology of decision making, which is, you know, the area of my doctoral dissertation.
00:04:53.060 This is called The Paradox of Choice, where basically he's arguing that in many cases, less is more, meaning fewer options to choose from might actually lead you to feeling happier as a decision maker.
00:05:08.440 Which is contrary to the classical economic approach, which basically says more information is always better, because that way it ensures that you will maximize your utility with more information.
00:05:19.660 But as we know, oftentimes, decision makers in general and consumers in particular, satisfies.
00:05:26.820 So now you see how I'm putting it all together.
00:05:28.980 What started as a frustration that I was feeling while reading this book, you know, why did I not get this one particular sentence where he raises some arcane 1890 reference to some monetary policy, and it's pissing me off that I'm not getting what he's talking about.
00:05:48.640 And then I step back and say, well, wait a second, in reading this book, I'm still going to walk away with enough nuggets that it was still worthwhile for me to read it.
00:05:58.860 And so there, I'm switching from my psychology of reading being one of maximizing to one of satisficing.
00:06:07.580 So there you go.
00:06:08.620 Hope that you've enjoyed this interlude, both the psychology of reading, psychology of decision making, psychometrics.
00:06:15.740 Please, if you appreciate what I do, and I've been doing this for many, many years, much of it for free, at the very least, just subscribe to the channel.
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00:06:39.720 Cheers, everybody.