You know the pattern. Two friends walk into a coffee shop. One of them scans the menu for approximately three seconds, orders a flat white, and sits down. The other one reads every item on the board, considers the espresso, weighs it against the drip coffee, notices that oat milk is more expensive but wonders whether it is actually worth the difference today given the temperature, briefly reconsiders the flat white, remembers they had one yesterday, and eventually orders something they are not quite sure they wanted. The person behind the counter waited patiently. The friend at the table is already scrolling their phone. And the person who overthought the coffee decision spends the first two minutes at the table quietly wondering whether they should have gone with the drip.
Popular culture has a specific label for the second person. Indecisive. High-maintenance. A little exhausting to be around at a menu. What the psychology literature has quietly documented, across three decades of careful research on decision-making styles, is that the popular label is not what is going on.
The distinction the research draws
According to a 2002 paper by Dr Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College with Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Katherine White and Darrin R. Lehman, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title “Maximizing Versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice”, the population divides, in decision-making terms, into two broad dispositions. The first, which the researchers call satisficers, decide by identifying an option that meets their criteria and taking it. Good enough is good enough. The satisficer is not scanning the entire choice set for the best possible option. They are scanning it for a satisfactory one, and when they find that, they stop scanning.
The second disposition, which Schwartz and colleagues call maximizers, cannot easily do that. Maximizers approach the same decision as an optimisation problem. They want the best available option, not the first satisfactory one. Which means they cannot stop evaluating until they are confident they have seen enough of the choice set to know what the best actually is. On any menu of more than a handful of items, that evaluation is genuinely demanding. Every option has to be considered against every other option. Every trade-off has to be at least briefly examined. The specific cognitive process is slower, more effortful, and considerably more tiring than what a satisficer is doing at the same coffee counter.
The Schwartz team developed a self-report measurement instrument called the Maximization Scale, tested it across seven separate samples, and documented what turned out to be one of the more replicated findings in modern decision-science research. Maximizers experience genuinely worse subjective outcomes from the same decisions than satisficers do. They report lower happiness, lower optimism, lower self-esteem, and lower life satisfaction. They report higher rates of depression, higher perfectionism, and considerably more regret. The finding is not that maximisation makes objectively worse decisions. It is that it produces measurably worse feelings about the decisions the person has actually made, regardless of how objectively good those decisions were.
On the topic of overthinking, this video dives into why overthinking isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a location problem.
Why the small decisions are the exhausting ones
The specific reason small decisions produce disproportionate mental fatigue for maximisers, on the accumulated research record, is not that the small decisions are harder. It is that the maximiser is running the same evaluation process regardless of how important the choice is. Coffee, salad dressing, socks, streaming service, restaurant. Each of them recruits the same underlying cognitive machinery of comparing, weighing, projecting outcomes, and worrying about the option not taken.
According to the foundational 2000 paper by Dr Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School and Dr Mark Lepper of Stanford University, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?”, this pattern shows up even in the population at large, not just in people scoring high on maximisation. In their now-famous field experiment at a California grocery store, Iyengar and Lepper set up a tasting booth offering either six or twenty-four varieties of jam. The larger display attracted more attention and drew more shoppers to the booth. It also produced a purchase rate roughly ten times lower than the smaller display. When people were given more options, they were more likely to walk away without deciding at all.
The Iyengar and Lepper finding has since been examined across many decision contexts. According to a 2015 meta-analysis co-authored by Alexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt and Joseph K. Goodman at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology under the title “Choice Overload: A Conceptual Review and Meta-Analysis”, ninety-nine separate observations across fifty-three studies confirm that the choice-overload effect is real but conditional. It appears reliably in contexts where the choice set is genuinely complex, where the decision task is genuinely difficult, where the person has genuine uncertainty about what they want, and where the person is trying to minimise the effort of choosing. It appears less reliably when the person has a clear preference going in.
Which is to say, on the combined evidence, the exhaustion at the coffee counter is not evidence of something wrong with the decider. It is what happens when a mind that is running a thorough evaluation process meets an environment that is offering it more options than the evaluation process can efficiently handle.
What the trait actually signals
The research does not, on the primary-source record, cleanly establish that maximisers are cognitively superior to satisficers in any general sense. What it does establish is that they are running a different decision-making strategy, that the strategy is demonstrably more effortful, and that it produces higher rates of regret and lower reported happiness for the person doing it. The reframe your title gestures at, meaning that the exhausted overthinker is not indecisive but doing something else instead, is supported by the research. What that something else is, on the current evidence, is a maximising decision style rather than a satisficing one.
The distinction is worth carrying because it produces different practical implications from the popular framing. If the person is genuinely indecisive, meaning they cannot access their own preferences, the intervention that would help them is clarifying what they want. If the person is maximising, meaning they can access their preferences perfectly well but cannot stop searching for the best possible fit, the intervention that would help them is a different one entirely. It is permission to stop searching. Permission to accept good enough. Permission to notice that on a menu of six coffees, on any ordinary Tuesday, the difference between the flat white and the drip is probably not the thing that will determine whether the afternoon goes well.
Which is, on the accumulated research record, easier to say than to do. Maximising is a stable disposition, not a decision the person makes each time. What can shift, on the intervention literature, is the choice environment. Fewer options, clearer defaults, and lower-stakes framings all reduce the effort a maximiser has to spend on any given decision. The exhaustion does not have to go away entirely. It just, on the current best understanding of the trait, does not have to be quite as expensive as it currently is.
Kiran Athar is not a psychologist or a decision scientist. She writes about psychology and the ordinary corners of life where the two intersect, drawing on peer-reviewed research and primary-source scholarship.