Are You a Maximizer or a Satisficer? How Your Decision Style Links to the Big Five

Maximizers and satisficers make decisions in fundamentally different ways, and that difference predicts how happy they feel afterward. A 2002 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Schwartz et al.), drawing on about 1,747 people across seven samples, found maximizers reported lower life satisfaction and more regret than satisficers. The pattern holds for meaningful choices, but it weakens for trivial, easily reversible ones.

What “maximizing” and “satisficing” actually mean

The terms trace back to economist Herbert Simon, who in 1955 described “satisficing” as settling for an option that is good enough rather than the theoretical best. Psychologist Barry Schwartz and colleagues turned the contrast into a measurable personality-style difference in 2002, when they published the 13-item Maximization Scale. Maximizing is the habit of scanning every available option to secure the single best outcome; satisficing is the habit of stopping once a choice clears your personal bar. The scale splits the tendency into three facets: alternative search, decision difficulty, and high standards.

Maximizer vs satisficer at a glance

Dimension	Maximizer	Satisficer
Goal	Find the single best option	Find an option that is good enough
Search behavior	Keeps scanning even after a decent choice appears	Stops once a threshold is met
After the choice	Second-guesses and compares upward	Moves on and rarely reopens the decision
Regret	Higher (r = .47 with maximizing in the 2002 study)	Lower
Life satisfaction	Lower on average	Higher on average

What the research says vs what pop psychology claims

Pop-psychology claim	What the research actually shows
“Maximizers make better, smarter choices.”	They often do better on paper — one 2006 study of graduating seniors found high maximizers landed jobs with about 20% higher starting salaries — but they feel worse about the outcome.
“Satisficing means you have low standards.”	False. Satisficers can hold high aspirations; they simply stop searching once the bar is met, which frees attention for other parts of life.
“More options always make you happier.”	For maximizers, more options raise the stakes of missing the best one, which amplifies regret rather than satisfaction.

The core finding is not that maximizers choose badly, but that the searching itself taxes them more than it rewards.

How the Big Five personality traits connect to maximizing

The Big Five (also called the Five Factor Model or OCEAN model) describes personality across five continuous dimensions. Openness to Experience covers curiosity and comfort with novelty. Conscientiousness is diligence, organization, and high personal standards. Extraversion is energy drawn from social engagement. Agreeableness is the tendency to cooperate and trust others. Neuroticism is the tendency toward negative emotion and stress reactivity. Reviews of maximization research find the tendency to maximize is modestly linked with higher conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness, while its connections to neuroticism and agreeableness are weak or inconsistent. Maximizing looks less like a marker of anxiety and more like a fingerprint of being organized, sociable, and curious — the same traits that keep people scanning their options.

Openness to Experience, the trait covering curiosity and comfort with novelty, fits the maximizer’s appetite for exploring alternatives. Conscientiousness, the trait of diligence and high personal standards, overlaps with the “high standards” facet of the scale. Extraversion’s energy and engagement may explain why maximizing shows up most in social, comparison-heavy domains like jobs and dating. Free tools such as personalitree.com summarize how these Big Five dimensions map onto everyday behavior, which helps make the link concrete.

The upside maximizers actually get

It is easy to frame maximizing as purely negative, but the data is more balanced. In the 2006 job-search study, maximizers pursued more opportunities and earned roughly 20% higher starting salaries than satisficers. Maximizing trades emotional comfort for material or achievement gains — a real trade, not a malfunction. The cost shows up after the decision, in lower satisfaction and more stress during the search, not in worse objective outcomes. A personality tendency sets a starting point, not a verdict on someone’s competence.

Can you change your default?

I have not run a maximization-scale study myself, so I am not going to invent one. What I can say from informal conversations with people taking personality assessments is that the maximizer–satisficer split tends to come up most vividly around big, hard-to-reverse choices — housing, jobs, partners — and goes quiet for small ones like which coffee to order. Research supports the idea that the habit is malleable: setting explicit “stop rules,” limiting options, and practicing quick decisions on low-stakes matters all reduce maximizing behavior. A trait points to a tendency, not a life sentence.

Frequently asked questions

Are you born a maximizer or does it develop?

Like most personality-linked tendencies, maximizing has both stable and learnable parts. The disposition appears fairly consistent across situations, but deliberate habits — such as pre-committing to a choice rule — can shift how strongly it shows up day to day.

Is maximizing the same as being a perfectionist?

They overlap but are not identical. Perfectionism centers on flawless performance, while maximizing centers on finding the best option among many. The 2002 scale found the two are correlated, yet many satisficers hold perfectionist standards in narrow domains.

Can taking a personality test tell me if I’m a maximizer?

Most general Big Five or 16-personality-type assessments measure the broader traits linked to maximizing rather than the habit directly. If you want to see where you land on those underlying traits, personalitree.com offers free Big Five and 16-personality-type assessments in about ten minutes. A dedicated maximization scale would give the most precise read.

Does being a satisficer make you miss out?

Sometimes, in the narrow sense that satisficers may stop searching before the absolute best option appears. But studies show they rarely regret it, because the emotional savings from not over-searching typically outweigh the occasional missed upgrade.

Why does more choice make maximizers unhappy?

More options raise the imagined cost of picking wrong and invite upward comparison with alternatives not chosen. For someone wired to find the best, abundance becomes a trap rather than a freedom, which is why choice overload hits maximizers hardest.

Written by: the Personalitree personality-science desk · Last updated: 2026-11-10 · Sources: published trait research, APA Dictionary of Psychology