Satisficing
by Mads SoegaardSatisficing describes the situation where people settle with a solution to a problem that is "good enough".
According to Herbert Simon, people do not seek the best possible solutions to problems, but operate within what he has called bounded rationality. Herbert Simon, whose primary object of research was problem solving, coined the term 'to satisfice', which denotes the situation where people seek solutions or accept choices or judgments that are 'good enough' for their purposes, but could be optimised (Simon 1957 as cited in Kunda 1999). In the tradition of rationalistic decision-making, it was conventionally assumed that individuals seek the optimal result. Instead, as Simon argues, it is often rational to seek to satisfice in that the process of looking for better solutions/results expends resources. A better solution would thus have to justify the extra costs carried in finding it.
References (bibliography)
(ed.) (1985): The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology. USA, Penguin
Kunda, Ziva (1999): Social cognition: Making sense of people. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press
View publication info on Amazon.com or .co.uk 
Simon, Herbert A. (1957): Models of man - social and rational. New York, John Wiley and Sons
Simon, Herbert A. (1981): The Sciences of the Artificial (2nd. ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press
Changes to this page
08 Sep 2004: Made minor changes
Copyright Notice
This page/work is copyright of Interaction-Design.org through the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.
