Maximizer Students Exert More Effort but are Less Satisfied

Inspired by prior groundbreaking studies on maximizing by Simon and other researchers, we sought to see whether the findings extend to lower-stakes decision-making. The particular lower- stakes context we chose to study is class selection by college students. We examined the relationships between maximizing tendency and four variables: information-seeking behavior, efforting behavior, regret affect, satisfaction affect. We had 130 different participants (64% female, 32% male, 4% other) from three semesters of a particular Pscyhology class at a university. The participants took an online questionnaire, which measured their maximizing tendency, behaviors, and affects related directly to our investigation. Through correlation tests, we found that maximizing was positively correlated with information-seeking (r = .34, p < .001), with efforting (r = .37, p < .001), and with regret (r = .23, p = .01); maximizing was negatively correlated on the outcome satisfaction variable (r = -.19, p = .03). With a Median Split and independent samples t-tests, we found that maximizers score higher in every area except on outcome satisfaction, where we did not find any result statistically significant. Our findings suggest there is a relationship between maximizing and the aforesaid behaviors and affects.