EAPSI: Cross-cultural differences in maximizing tendencies and well-being

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Maximizers employ a decision-making strategy in which they attempt to select the optimal choice in a given set of options. In contrast, satisficers search through a set of options and will select a choice that is deemed "good enough." In many studies, the tendency to maximize has related negatively to life satisfaction, optimism, and positive emotions and positively to regret and negative emotions. However, researchers have not explored this tendency to maximize in the domain of friendship selections. To explore this area, a recently developed questionnaire to measure this tendency in American undergraduates will be translated into Japanese and distributed to students at the Hokkaido University in Japan. This research will be conducted at Hokkaido University in collaboration with Professor Masaki Yuki, an expert in cross-cultural psychology. The goal of this study is to improve our understanding of how the tendency to maximize in selecting friends relates to well-being and how this might vary across cultures. The present proposal aims to expand on this area of research in two ways. One, a new domain of maximizing will be examined, namely friendship selections. Two, a particular aspect of the social ecology, namely relational mobility, will be considered as a potential moderating variable. Relational mobility can be defined as the ease in which one can move in and out of social relationships within a particular society. Research has shown that relational mobility tends to be higher in the United States than Japan. Thus, the tendency to maximize in selecting friends would relate negatively to well-being in both the United States and Japan, but this negative consequence of maximizing would be even more detrimental to the well-being of individuals in societies of high relational mobility in the United States. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.