Abstract Satisficing is a behavior that often results in careless responding and has been defined as engagement in simplified question responding approaches to reduce mental effort, often at the cost of response quality. Our objective was to examine the possibility of using a new survey response time (RT) based metric, response time adjustment, in combination with average survey RT, to identify groups with different levels of satisficing behavior. The RT adjustment parameter reflects the extent to which individuals adjust the amount of time they spend on survey items as a function of how demanding an item is, with low adjustment along with a low average survey RT expected to be associated with a greater likelihood of satisficing. We estimated a mixture model with RT adjustment and average RT as inputs using three questionnaires (with sample sizes of 5,321, 1,616, and 4,093, respectively) from the Understanding America Study (UAS), a large US Internet-based longitudinal panel. Weak and non-satisficing groups were identified in all three studies, with the former making up 3 to 9 percent of the samples, but no strong satisficing group was detected. Evidence supporting a weak satisficing group was based on good accuracy on easy attention check items (indicating they likely were not careless) but low accuracy on more demanding attention check items involving carefully reading long blocks of instructional text. Additionally, consistent with prior literature on satisficing, this weak satisficing group generally had lower mean values on cognitive ability and motivation-related variables (e.g., conscientiousness) compared to other groups. In two of the three studies, the satisficing group produced notable bias in study results involving high time intensity items. RT regulation and average RT may be useful for identifying satisficing in surveys with a mix of high and low time intensity items such as some tests and surveys with vignette-based items.
Hernandez et al. (Wed,) studied this question.