There are a lot of areas where people don’t feel as if they have expertise, and ratings “get rid of that feeling of not being competent,” Rick Larrick, a professor of management and organization at Duke University, told me.
Dr. Larrick has studied consumers’ tendency to trust rankings and, in particular, to chase “the best.” He has found that people put a strange amount of faith in this. “As soon as you put a rank on things,” even something like toilet cleaner, “people’s preference for the top-ranked one increases substantially, by around 20 percent,” he said. “There is something about the comfort of using the simple differentiation between one and two. The ranks make it easy to make the decision, and then there’s some feeling to being able to clearly tell yourself that you got the best one.”
I’d venture that not many people (possibly not any people) are able to tell the difference between the top toilet cleaner and the second best — or even the fifth or sixth. This suggests that the appeal of the best is not really about a simple difference in the quality of the product, but more about a feeling: of reassurance, maybe; of having won, having got the right thing.
Dan’s proclivities would place him squarely as “a maximizer,” a category of consumer invented by Barry Schwartz, an emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” which examines the detrimental side of endless consumer options. Dr. Schwartz defines people who are happy to settle for something that will probably be pretty good (a restaurant with above average, but not excellent, ratings; the third song they come to on a playlist; the midpriced toaster on the first page of Amazon) as “satisficers” and those who search exhaustively for the best version as “maximizers.” (Many people who are generally satisficers will have certain things that bring out their inner maximizer. In other words, we all have an inner Dan Symons.)
When I started thinking about this idea of bests, it was through the prism of my own disposition, that of a settler, someone of the “just get one that works” school of thought. When I see a broken toaster, I see an annoying problem to be solved as quickly as possible. But Dan sees an opportunity: to get something that works a little faster, which would perhaps be more aesthetically pleasing, or run smoother, or not break so easily, and thus, to make life just that tiny bit better, with the only cost being a small investment in time spent doing research.