Sublime

FACT OF LIFE #2: We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice. When we’re designing pages, we tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one. In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.1 As

By simply having more rating categories to choose from, Group B unconsciously, inadvertently, and incorrectly decided that they have almost no star performers.

turned out that when traffic was low, people were served quickly. Word got around, doctors and paramedics referred people, and North Millerfield’s clinic became crowded. But people have an innate distaste for sitting in busy waiting rooms. Since they had a choice, they went elsewhere.

Short-term solutions might make sense in the moment, but they never win in the long term. You feel like you’re moving forward when you’re actually just going in circles. People gravitate toward them because finding a short-term fix signals to others that they’re doing something. That’s the social default at work. It fools people into mistaking

Simon argued that when we are confronted with a hard problem, the cognitive limitations of the mind make rationality moot. In his view, we seek ‘good enough’ choices rather than optimal ones. He called this bounded rationality.

The point is that high take-up of the default option cannot be viewed as a success in and of itself.

You think you want more choice and more options. But when you have unlimited choice, you feel worse. When you keep all options open, you’re conflicted and miserable. Your thoughts are divided. Your power is diluted. Your time is thinly spread. Indecision keeps you shallow. Get the deeper pleasure of diving into one choice.

Second, being wrong hurts us more than being right feels good. We know from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on loss aversion, part of prospect theory (which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), that losses in general feel about two times as bad as wins feel good. So winning $100 at blackjack feels as good to us as losing $50