24-question decision-style test scoring high standards, alternative search and decision difficulty separately. No single maximiser score.
Decision Style Test — Maximiser or Satisficer
Twenty-four statements, about three minutes. You will get three separate scores: high standards, alternative search, and decision difficulty. There is no total and no "you are a maximiser" verdict — because maximising was measured as one thing for a long time, and it is at least three, only two of which cost you anything.
Only two of the three factors carry the well-being cost. Wanting an excellent outcome is not one of them.
How the Decision Style Test Works
Answer as you are, not as you would like to be
There is no good or bad result here, only an accurate or inaccurate one. One of the three factors is flattering (high standards) and one is unflattering (decision difficulty), and most people push the first up and the second down without noticing. Knowing that in advance makes the result better.
Rate 24 statements
Eight per factor, four worded each way. The balance is there to defeat straight-line answering: agree with everything and all three scores land exactly on the midpoint of 24, and the page will tell you so.
Read the three scores separately
Each is a sum of eight items on a published 8–40 scale, not a percentile. There is no total and there never will be — "maximising" was measured as one thing for two decades, and it is at least three, only two of which cost you anything.
Read the combination, not any single bar
High standards with low search and low difficulty is a genuinely good profile: wants good outcomes, decides fast, does not re-open. Modest standards with high search and high difficulty is the full cost with none of the benefit. One maximiser score calls both of those people the same thing.
About Maximising and Satisficing — the Science, Honestly Told
Where the Framework Comes From
The thread runs back to Herbert Simon: people do not evaluate every option and take the optimum, they stop at the first one that is good enough — he called it satisficing. In 2002 Schwartz and colleagues brought the distinction into personality measurement, which produced both the popular maximiser/satisficer vocabulary and the claim repeated everywhere since, that maximisers end up less happy. Later re-analyses found something more important: what was measured as one thing is at least three. High standards is where you set the bar. Alternative search is how many options you actually work through. Decision difficulty is what choosing costs you. Those three were summed into a single score on one questionnaire, and their consequences are not the same. One of them is close to a virtue and the other two are where the bill arrives, so an average of the three describes nobody in particular: the person who wants excellent outcomes and decides in four seconds and the person who compares everything and cannot commit can land on the same number. Separating them again is the entire reason this tool exists.
The twenty-four statements you will rate are an original RECATOOLS item set: eight per factor, balanced keying, scoring published openly on this page. We wrote our own because the best-known instrument for this construct is journal-controlled with no commercial-use grant available from a primary source, and the later short forms are the same; our standing rule is that a licence needing an email to confirm counts as unlicensed rather than pending. Constructs are not copyrightable and item text is, so we borrowed the first and wrote the second. The honesty runs both ways. The three-factor structure is a published finding, but the separation between our particular items is an editorial claim: no validation study of its own, no factor analysis on a real sample, no norms. That is why you will never see a percentile here, only a position on the published 8–40 scale, and why every result page repeats the point rather than burying it in a footnote.
"High standards with low search and low difficulty is a genuinely good profile. A single maximiser score calls that person a maximiser and tells them they are probably unhappy."
What the Research Does and Does Not Support
The popular claim is half right. High standards on its own is benign to positive — associated with achievement and, in several studies, with better objective outcomes, the best-known example being job seekers who aimed higher and accepted better-paid offers. The regret, the dissatisfaction with what was chosen and the lower reported well-being sit with the other two factors: the exhaustive searching and the difficulty of choosing. Which produces the error worth naming. Someone with a high bar who decides quickly and does not re-open is doing well by every measure, and a binary test labels that person a maximiser and warns them of a dissatisfaction they do not have; someone with modest standards who compares everything and agonises anyway carries the full cost with none of the benefit, and the same test may reassure them. None of which makes the vocabulary worthless — it comes from a real research tradition and works as shorthand. This tool changes how the construct is scored and reported, not whether it was worth studying.
The Three Factors
High Standards
Where you set the bar: an excellent outcome rather than an acceptable one. The benign-to-positive factor of the three — not the part that produces regret.
Alternative Search
A behaviour: comparing many versions, reading reviews past the point of new information, still looking after finding something that would do. One of the two costly factors.
Decision Difficulty
What choosing costs you: postponement, being stuck between similar options, going back over it afterwards. Not a diagnosis of anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Because maximising is not one thing. The published work splits it into three factors — high standards, alternative search and decision difficulty — and the three do not carry the same consequences. High standards on its own is benign to positive, associated with achievement and in several studies with better objective outcomes. The regret, the dissatisfaction and the lower well-being sit with the other two. Averaging a benign standard together with two costly processes and calling the result a personality type throws away the most useful information on the page. Our scoring kernel returns no total, and the test suite carries an assertion specifically to stop one being added later.
-
No. Three high scores describe a combination: you want good outcomes, you compare a lot of options, and choosing is uncomfortable. That combination is tiring, but it is not a fault and it is not a defect. The work, if you want to do any, lives in the second and third factors rather than in the first. People who hear "maximisers are unhappy" often respond by lowering what they expect from life, which is precisely the one part of this that the evidence says to keep.
-
No, and there is no softer way to put it. This is not a screen for anything clinical. There is no threshold on this scale at which a number becomes a condition, and 40 out of 40 simply means the highest position on a published 8–40 scale. If indecision is reaching your work, your relationships or your sleep, that is worth talking to a professional about, and it is a genuinely different question from where a 24-item web questionnaire put a number.
-
To catch straight-line answering. Some people tend to agree with statements regardless of content, or to disagree with all of them, and on a one-directional bank that habit turns straight into a score. With half the items reversed the habit cancels itself out: agree with all 24 and every factor lands exactly on the midpoint of 24, and the page tells you when it detects this. The reversed items are also genuine statements of the low pole rather than forward items with a "not" added, because a negated copy is transparent and people answer it as the original.
-
RECATOOLS did — twenty-four original statements, with the scoring rule published on this page and an authorship attestation in the tool's provenance record. The reason is licensing. The best-known instrument for this construct (Schwartz et al., 2002) is journal-controlled, copyright APA, and no commercial-use grant is available from a primary source; the later short forms and three-factor refinements are journal-controlled too, with no commercial grant located. Our standing rule is that a licence needing an email to confirm is treated as unlicensed rather than pending. Constructs are not copyrightable and item text is, so we borrowed the first and wrote the second.
-
No. The standards / search / difficulty split is a published finding about the construct, reported in re-analyses of the original scale (notably Nenkov and colleagues, 2008). How many dimensions a construct has is a fact about the world rather than copyrightable expression, so adopting it does not mean adopting anybody's items. The other half of the honesty: the separation between our specific items has not been checked with a factor analysis on a real sample. It is an editorial claim we took care over, and it is labelled as one in the provenance record and on every result page.
-
No — different situation, different construct. The conflict style test (RT-PSY-009) measures what you do when you disagree with another person: whether you compete, compromise, avoid, accommodate or collaborate. It presumes a counterparty and a disagreement that has to be settled between you. This test measures how you approach choice itself, including entirely private choices with nobody else involved — what to eat, which laptop, whether to take the offer. Somebody can be decisive in conflict and still stall in front of a menu for ten minutes. The two results do not substitute for each other and should not be read as one thing.
-
No. Your answers are scored entirely in your browser and are never uploaded or stored by RECATOOLS. While a test is in progress they are kept in your browser's local storage so you can resume if the tab closes, and they are deleted when you finish. Nothing is posted to a server — the three scores you see were computed on your own device. Viewing pages on this site works like any other website and is covered by our Privacy Policy.
-
Yes, and not all at the same rate. High standards behaves most like a stable disposition. Alternative search and decision difficulty are noticeably situation-sensitive: money being tight, a sudden increase in options, or a recent decision that went badly all push them up. If you retake this a few years from now, those two are the ones most likely to have moved. More to the point, this item set has no test-retest reliability study, so we cannot tell you how stable its results are. Treat it as a snapshot.
-
Alternative search. It is close to neutral — comparing prices and reading reviews is neither a virtue nor a failing, so people describe it fairly accurately. High standards is flattering and gets pushed up. Decision difficulty is unflattering and gets pushed down, though less than you might expect, because the label has become a sympathetic and self-deprecating one rather than a shameful one. So if the three tell inconsistent stories, weight the search score; and if your standards score is high while your search score is low, the honest reading may be that your bar is lower in practice than in self-description.
Related News
You may be interested in these recent stories from our newsroom.
No related news yet for this tool. Our editorial team publishes new pieces every week.
Browse all news →Pick up where you left off
Stored only in this browser — never sent to our servers.