The incorrigible satisficer – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness

If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it. In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing. But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all. There’s a better way to make decisions. To understand it, you should know about Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, as well as a Nobel laureate in economics. ….[READ]