Satis/fice

• Satisfice and Satisficing

  • Satisfice means to accept the first option that meets a minimum standard instead of searching for the best one. It is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, coined by Person/Herbert A. Simon in 1956.[1] [2]

  • Etymology

    • Source words: satisfy, for meeting a need, and suffice, for being enough.[2]
    • "Satisfice" was already in use in the 1500s as a northern variant of satisfy, with the earliest documented use in 1561. Simon gave the old spelling a new meaning.[2] [3]

  • History

    • Before the word

      • Simon's book Administrative Behavior (1947) was his first major book, on administrative decision making.[4]
      • In "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice" (1955) he described choosing among alternatives by a two-valued payoff, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, with the boundary at an "aspiration level." His example was a house seller who regards $15,000 as acceptable, anything over it as satisfactory and anything under it as unsatisfactory.[5]

    • The 1956 coinage

      • "Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment" appeared in Psychological Review 63(2) in March 1956.[1] [6]
      • Simon argued that "organisms adapt well enough to 'satisfice'; they do not, in general, 'optimize.'"[6]
      • He described a choice mechanism that pursues "a 'satisficing' path, a path that will permit satisfaction at some specified level of all of its needs."[6]
      • He thanked Person/Allen Newell for "numerous enlightening conversations on the subject of this paper."[6]

    • Bounded rationality

      • Satisficing became the standard example of bounded rationality: decision makers have limited information and limited capacity to compute, so a rule that stops at "good enough" is a rational response, not a failure.[1] [7]
      • Simon's 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations."[8]

    • Artificial intelligence

      • Simon came to believe that a theory of decision making needed a theory of human problem solving, studied through computer programs. In 1955 he, Person/Allen Newell and J. Clifford Shaw created Logic Theorist, which used heuristic rules to prove theorems, and Simon and Newell shared the 1975 Turing Award.[9] [10]

    • Maximizers and satisficers

      • In 2002 Person/Barry Schwartz and co-authors published "Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.[11]
      • The paper reported a Maximization Scale that measures the desire to maximize. Maximizing correlated negatively with happiness, optimism, self-esteem and life satisfaction, and positively with depression, perfectionism and regret.[11]
      • Schwartz carried the distinction into The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004), where too many options make choosing harder and outcomes feel worse.[12]

    • Fast and frugal heuristics

      • Person/Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd and the ABC Research Group presented simple decision rules as a psychologically realistic account of bounded rationality in Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (1999).[13]

  • Footnotes

    • [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13310708/

    • [2] https://wordsmith.org/words/satisfice.html

    • [3] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/satisficing_n

    • [4] https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/Biographical-Profiles/Simon-Herbert-A

    • [5] https://cooperative-individualism.org/simon-herbert_a-behavioral-model-of-rational-choice-1955-feb.pdf

    • [6] https://pages.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/Simon1956PsychReview.pdf

    • [7] https://philpapers.org/rec/SIMRCA

    • [8] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1978/simon/facts/

    • [9] https://www.informs.org/Explore/History-of-O.R.-Excellence/Biographical-Profiles/Simon-Herbert-A

    • [10] https://history.computer.org/pioneers/newell.html

    • [11] https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-psychology/101/

    • [12] https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/books/the-paradox-of-choice-why-more-is-less-barry-schwartz/

    • [13] https://books.google.com/books/about/Simple_Heuristics_that_Make_Us_Smart.html?id=9RNF8TUmRywC