Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice and Cautiousness (C6)

Barry Schwartz is a psychologist who noticed that the modern promise of endless choice was quietly making people miserable, and The Paradox of Choice is his explanation. More options should mean more freedom and more satisfaction. Instead, past a point, they mean more paralysis and more regret, because every choice you make is shadowed by all the ones you did not. In his TED talk he offers the fix as a paradox of its own: "The secret to happiness is low expectations." How hard you chew on a decision before making it is, in the Big Five, one facet.

The weighing of options is the Cautiousness facet

That facet is Cautiousness (C6), under Conscientiousness, how much you deliberate and weigh consequences before you act. Schwartz's key split maps onto it. A maximizer, who must find the very best option, is running C6 at full volume, examining every alternative before committing. A satisficer, who takes the first option that is good enough, spends far less of it. High C6 is usually an asset, catching mistakes before they happen, but the book is about the point where it turns on you: when the weighing never ends, and every decision becomes a small ordeal of comparison and second-guessing.

This is the shadow side of a good trait rather than a flaw in a bad one. A maximizer often does end up with a slightly better objective outcome, the marginally cheaper flight or better job, and reliably feels worse about it, because the effort and the lingering doubt cost more than the small gain is worth. Schwartz's low expectations are really a way of borrowing a satisficer's lighter touch on purpose: deciding in advance that good enough is allowed, so a high-C6 mind can stop auditing choices that do not deserve it. It does not lower your Cautiousness. It picks where to spend it.

For a reader placing themselves, your C6 is a fair read on how much any given decision is going to cost you in deliberation, and how prone you are to regret after. High on it and Schwartz is describing your Saturday afternoons, and the useful move is deciding which choices are worth the full treatment and which are not. Low on it and you may make faster peace with good enough, at the occasional cost of a better option you never went looking for. Where you sit on Cautiousness tells you how heavy the weighing runs before you ever reach a choice, and we take the facet apart in Cautiousness (C6).

Read the book: The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz.

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