Decision Style Test

High standards in one paragraph

A higher score here describes where you set the bar, and nothing else. You want the outcome to be excellent rather than adequate. Something that only just works registers as a disappointment rather than a solved problem. You hold your own output above what the room would happily accept, and your free evenings too — a passable film is not a neutral event, it is two hours you would like back. This is the factor on this test that is benign to positive: not the part that makes choosing painful, not the part that keeps you comparing at midnight, and on its own associated with better outcomes rather than worse ones. If you came expecting to be told that a high bar is what makes people unhappy with their choices, this page disagrees, and will say why.

How this result was measured

Eight of the twenty-four statements measured this factor — four worded towards it, four worded away and reverse-scored, so agreeing with everything cannot manufacture a high score. Each answer contributes 1 to 5, for a range of 8 to 40, and we cut that published range into thirds: 18 and below lower, 19 to 29 middle, 30 and above higher. Those are positions on our scale, not percentiles. There is no norm sample behind this test, so we cannot tell you where you sit relative to other people, and we would rather say so than invent a figure.

Note what these eight items did not ask about. They did not ask how many options you look at, whether choosing is hard, whether you postpone, or whether you go back over decisions afterwards. Those are the other two factors, scored separately on purpose. A standard is a level you want; searching is a behaviour; difficulty is a cost. The usual way this construct gets mismeasured is by writing "I want the best" items and "I check every shop" items into the same scale and reporting one number for both — so this page will keep saying it: your score here is about the bar, not the hunt.

There is deliberately no combined "maximiser score" on this test. That is the whole reason the tool exists, and the section below explains what the combined version gets wrong.

What it looks like day to day

You notice quality in a way other people find slightly exhausting, and you are aware of this. The chair is not just a chair; it was designed by someone who cared or by someone who did not, and you can tell within about four seconds. You will rewrite a message that already said the thing, because it said it clumsily. When a colleague sends work over with "this is fine, right?", you have a small internal negotiation between the answer that is true and the answer that keeps the afternoon moving.

At work it shows up as the last ten percent. Most people stop when the task is done; you stop when it is right, which is a later moment. That gap is where the value is, and where the arguments about deadlines live.

Crucially, none of that has to involve extended searching. Plenty of people with a very high bar buy the first thing that clears it and never look again — because the bar itself is doing the filtering. If that describes you, look at your other two scores before you read anything else on this page.

Where it helps and where it costs

It helps anywhere the difference between adequate and excellent matters: craft work, design, writing, cooking, anything where the person on the receiving end can feel the care even if they cannot name it. High standards are how expertise gets built, because expertise is mostly the accumulated result of not accepting your own first attempt. They also protect you from a failure low standards cannot detect — the slow drift where everything is fine, nothing is good, and nobody has noticed for two years.

The costs are real but narrower than the reputation suggests. Time is the first: the last ten percent is the expensive ten percent, and a high bar applied indiscriminately spends it on things that did not warrant it. Second, standards travel — held privately they are a discipline, held out loud they can read as contempt for everyone else's work, and the difference is entirely in the delivery. Third, a high bar with no stopping rule is where the trouble starts, and the stopping rule is the thing to build, not the bar to lower. Note what all three are: costs of managing a high standard. They are not the well-being penalty the popular version of this test warns about — that belongs to the other two factors.

What the research does and does not support

The popular framing is that maximisers — people who want the best — are less happy than satisficers, who settle for good enough. It is repeated everywhere and it is only partly right. The correction comes from the structure of the construct: what was measured as one thing is at least three, and the three do not behave alike.

Standards, taken on their own, are the benign component. They relate to achievement, and in several studies to better objective outcomes — the well-known example being job seekers who aimed higher and ended up with 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. Those are the parts that hurt, and a single number averages them away.

Which produces the error worth naming. Someone with a high bar who decides quickly and does not revisit — high standards, low search, low difficulty — is doing genuinely well: good outcomes, not paid for twice. A binary test calls that person a maximiser and warns them of a dissatisfaction they do not have. Someone with modest standards who compares everything and agonises anyway gets the full cost with none of the benefit, and the same test may call them a satisficer and reassure them. It gets both people wrong in the direction that matters.

None of this makes the maximiser/satisficer vocabulary worthless. It comes from a real research tradition — Herbert Simon's satisficing, brought into personality measurement in 2002 — and as shorthand it remains useful. This tool corrects how the construct is scored and reported, not whether it was worth studying.

Four things worth doing with a higher score

1. Read this score next to your other two, not alone. High standards with low search and low difficulty is a good profile and needs no fixing. High standards alongside high search and high difficulty is a different situation, and the work lives in those two, not in the bar.
2. Set the bar per task, before you start. The waste is almost never caused by having a high standard; it is caused by applying the same one to a client deliverable and to a form nobody will read. Decide which tier a task is in at the beginning, when that is a cheap decision.
3. Define "done" as a condition, not a feeling. Write down what finished looks like — two named criteria is enough — and stop when they are met rather than when you stop noticing flaws. You will not stop noticing flaws. That is what a high bar is.
4. Say the standard, not the verdict. "I want this tight enough that a stranger gets it on one read" is a shared target. "This isn't good enough" is a grade. The first is the part of you a team can use; the second is why high standards get a reputation they mostly do not deserve.

The honest caveat

This is the flattering factor, and that moves the numbers. Agreeing that you want excellent results and hold yourself to a high bar is a comfortable thing to say, so scores here are pushed up — not by lying, mostly, but by the ordinary generosity people extend to themselves while answering. That makes this the least trustworthy of the three. The most trustworthy is alternative search, which is close to neutral: comparing prices and reading reviews is neither a virtue nor a failing, so people describe it accurately. Decision difficulty is unflattering and gets pushed down, though less than you would expect.

Beyond that, the standard limits. These are original RECATOOLS items on a studied construct: no validation study of their own, no factor analysis on a real sample, no norms. The three-factor separation is a published finding about the construct; the separation between our items is an editorial claim we took care over rather than a demonstrated result. This is a vocabulary for self-reflection, not a measurement, and not a diagnosis of anything.

From the RECATOOLS Decision Style item set — an original 24-item composition over the public satisficing and maximising literature; eight statements for each of three factors, each scored 8–40 and reported separately, with no composite and no maximiser/satisficer verdict by design. Items, scoring and the authorship attestation are documented in this tool's provenance record.