Wanting the Best, or Wanting to Be the Best?

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We live in a status-hungry world. For some, this means attending the best university, driving the fanciest car, carrying the most fashionable purse, or even sporting the most avant-garde beard. While all of these consumer goods and choices may represent high-achieving feats, what do they actually mean? Are people simply looking to obtain the highest quality items, or are they using the quality of these outcomes to maximize themselves?

In his book, The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz distinguishes between two types of consumers: satisficers and maximizers. Satisficers are those consumers who settle on consumer goods or experiences that are hedonically acceptable. For example, when listening to music, satisficers will scroll through a list of songs until they find the first one that is pretty good. Maximizers, on the other hand, are perfectionists. They are always striving to maximize their outcomes. So, when listening to music, they will likely scroll through a long list of songs, until they find the very best song to play. And these personality types have important consequences: Compared to satisficers, maximizers tend to garner more job interviews, more job offers, and higher starting salaries.

Recent research, however, is delving deeper into the connection between these two personality types and social comparison. While we would already expect that maximizers have greater tendencies to prefer higher quality consumer goods than satisficers, Dr. Kimberlee Weaver of the University of Haifa and colleagues are uncovering even more intriguing findings. In one experiment, participants were asked a series of questions in which they were to make a choice between an option that maximized quality or their social position. That is, participants were asked to choose between two situations. In one, they were told, “Your car rates 5 out of 10 points on a luxury scale; others' cars rate 3 out of 10,” which highlights positional advantage. In the second, they were told, “Your car rates 7 out of 10 points on a luxury scale; others' cars rate 9 out of 10,” which highlights objective quality. Compared to those who identified as satisficers, participants who identified as maximizers preferred to maximize positional advantage over objective quality. In the words of Kim Weaver and her colleagues, “Maximizers appear to be more concerned with relative standing than satisficers, even when that relative standing comes at the cost of objective quality.”

In the bigger picture, these results suggest that maximizers are actually not maximizing quality, per se, but they are maximizing their relative standing. And these preferences extend to a wide range of domains—including the number of job offers, level of personal education, and yearly income. Thus, maximizers do not want to buy the best; they want to be the best. In this light, maximizers may be prone to be “minimizers” of objective value, which may be problematic in the long run. After all, as Barry Schwartz notes in his book, maximizers are less likely to be happy, optimistic, and elated. So, if you’re a perfectionist, continue to strive for high quality, just not at the expense of the quality itself – or at the expense of your own well-being.