To do or not to do: Desirability and consistency mediate judgments of regret.

In 4 studies, the authors demonstrated that when errors associated with action were inconsistent with decision makers' orientation, they were undesirable and produced more regret than did errors associated with inaction. Conversely, when errors associated with action were consistent with decision makers' orientation, they were desirable and produced less regret than did errors associated with inaction. Desirability and consistency mediated this relationship, independent of mutability. These results were obtained when judgments and decisions to act or not act were made in close temporal proximity to one another as well as when participants reflected on their past decisions. The authors provide an analysis of when counterfactuals would and would not be expected to mediate judgments of normality and regret. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of anticipated regret in escalation of commitment.

This research tests the general proposition that people are motivated to reduce future regret under escalation situations. This is supported by the findings that (a) escalation of commitment is stronger when the possibility of future regret about withdrawal is high than when this possibility is low (Studies 1a and 1b) and (b) escalation of commitment increases as the net anticipated regret about withdrawal increases (Studies 2a and 2b). Furthermore, the regret effects in the 4 studies were above and beyond the personal responsibility effects on escalation. This research indicates that people in escalation situations are simultaneously influenced by the emotions they expect to experience in the future (e.g., anticipated regret) and by events that have happened in the past (e.g., responsibility for the initiating previous decision). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cost of richness: The effect of the size and diversity of decision sets on post-decision regret.

Decision making is often made difficult by the knowledge that one has to live with the outcomes of one's choices and with the regret that these might engender. Formal theories propose that regret is proportional to the difference between the outcome of the option chosen and the expected outcome of the next best alternative that one may have chosen instead. It follows that the number of alternatives available for choice does not affect post-decisional regret. In this study, however, the authors proposed that regret is related to the comparison between the alternative chosen and the union of the positive attributes of the alternatives rejected. This general proposition yielded 2 hypotheses: (a) the larger number of alternatives from which one can choose and (b) the more diverse those alternatives are, the stronger the regret that an unsatisfactory choice would cause. These hypotheses were tested and supported by 4 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotions and preventive health behavior: Worry, regret, and influenza vaccination.

The role of worry, regret, and perceived risk in preventive health decisions was explored in a longitudinal questionnaire study on influenza vaccination among 428 university employees. The study yielded 3 main findings. First, ratings of anticipated worry and regret were stronger predictors of vaccination than perceived risk and mediated the effect of risk on vaccination. Second, the anticipated level of emotions differed systematically from experienced emotions, such that vaccinated individuals anticipated more regret and less worry than they actually experienced. Third, anticipated and experienced emotions had implications for subsequent vaccination decisions. Those who did not vaccinate in the 1st year but had high levels of worry and regret were likely to be vaccinated the following year. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of interpersonal harm in distinguishing regret from guilt.

Regret and guilt are emotions that are produced by negative outcomes for which one is responsible. Both emotions have received ample attention in the psychological literature; however, it is still unclear to what extent regret and guilt represent distinct psychological processes. We examined the extent to which the distinction between interpersonal harm (negative outcomes for others) and intrapersonal harm (negative outcomes for self) is crucial in differentiating these two emotions. In a series of 3 studies we found that guilt is predominantly felt in situations of interpersonal harm, whereas regret is felt in both situations of interpersonal harm and intrapersonal harm. Moreover, the results show that in situations of interpersonal harm the phenomenology of regret shares many, but not all features with the phenomenology of guilt. We conclude that the emotion processes resulting from interpersonal and intrapersonal harm are clearly distinct, but that regret as an emotion label is applied to both types of processes whereas the emotion label guilt is primarily used to refer to experiences of interpersonal harm. Implications for emotion research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

I'm feeling lucky: The relationship between affect and risk-seeking in the framing effect.

Engagement in risky behavior has traditionally been attributed to an underestimation of the associated risks, but recent perspectives suggest that affective reactions toward a risky option may better explain risk-seeking than risk perception. However, the precise relationship between emotion and risk-seeking remains unclear. The current set of studies elucidates the relationship between emotion and risk-seeking in risky choice framing, using a gambling task. In Study 1, reliance on emotion was related to risk-seeking, but goals to regulate emotion mitigated these effects. In Study 2, positive affect was associated with risk-seeking in loss frames, but unrelated to risk aversion in gain frames. Collectively, these findings indicate a general role for emotion reliance on risk-seeking and a specific role of positive affect on risk-seeking in the loss trials of the framing effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The psychology of doing nothing: Forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion.

Several independent lines of research bear on the question of why individuals avoid decisions by postponing them, failing to act, or accepting the status quo. This review relates findings across several different disciplines and uncovers 4 decision avoidance effects that offer insight into this common but troubling behavior: choice deferral, status quo bias, omission bias, and inaction inertia. These findings are related by common antecedents and consequences in a rational-emotional model of the factors that predispose humans to do nothing. Prominent components of the model include cost-benefit calculations, anticipated regret, and selection difficulty. Other factors affecting decision avoidance through these key components, such as anticipatory negative emotions, decision strategies, counterfactual thinking, and preference uncertainty, are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes.

People prefer to make changeable decisions rather than unchangeable decisions because they do not realize that they may be more satisfied with the latter. Photography students believed that having the opportunity to change their minds about which prints to keep would not influence their liking of the prints. However, those who had the opportunity to change their minds liked their prints less than those who did not (Study 1). Although the opportunity to change their minds impaired the postdecisional processes that normally promote satisfaction (Study 2a), most participants wanted to have that opportunity (Study 2b). The results demonstrate that errors in affective forecasting can lead people to behave in ways that do not optimize their happiness and well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of human intuition in psychology.

An empirically valid outcome in psychology may differ in the degree to which the outcome does or does not conform to human intuition. The author provides a brief history of three psychological outcomes violating human intuition, notes the resemblance to the common sense revolution, and then discusses how human intuition may be detrimental to behaviorism and evolutionary perspectives of human nature. The role of human intuition in supernatural beliefs is considered and, finally, possible methods to improve the plausibility of counterintuitive outcomes are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measuring adolescent smoking expectancies by incorporating judgments about the expected time of occurrence of smoking outcomes.

French and English Canadian adolescents completed a smoking expectancy questionnaire and 2 measures of current smoking status. Multiple regression revealed that beliefs about the expected time of occurrence of smoking outcomes explained unique variance in current smoking after controlling for judgments about the probability and desirability of these outcomes. In addition, the relationship between the perceived probability of the general costs of smoking and current smoking was moderated by beliefs about the expected time of occurrence of these costs. There was no relationship between perceived probability of general costs and smoking for adolescents who expected the costs to occur far in the future, whereas there was a significant negative relationship between these 2 variables for adolescents who expected the costs to occur soon after smoking. The authors' results suggest that it may be possible to increase the concurrent validity of traditional smoking expectancy measures by incorporating expected-time-of-occurrence judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Goal directedness and decision making in infants.

The term goal directed conventionally refers to either of 2 separate process types—motor processes organizing action oriented toward physical targets and decision-making processes that select these targets by integrating desire for and knowledge of action outcomes. Even newborns are goal directed in the first sense, but the status of infants as decision makers (the focus here) is unknown. In this study, 24-month-olds learned to retrieve an object from a box by pressing a button, and then the object’s value was increased. After the object’s subsequent disappearance, these children were more likely to press the button to try to retrieve the object than were control 24-month-olds who had learned to retrieve the object but for whom the object’s value was unchanged. Such sensitivity to outcome value when selecting actions is a hallmark of decision making. However, 14- and 19-month-olds showed no such sensitivity. Possible explanations include that they had not learned the specifics of the action outcome; they had not acquired the necessary desire; or they had acquired both but did not integrate them to make a decision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond the group mind: A quantitative review of the interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect.

This quantitative review of 130 comparisons of interindividual and intergroup interactions in the context of mixed-motive situations reveals that intergroup interactions are generally more competitive than interindividual interactions. The authors identify 4 moderators of this interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect, each based on the theoretical perspective that the discontinuity effect flows from greater fear and greed in intergroup relative to interindividual interactions. Results reveal that each moderator shares a unique association with the magnitude of the discontinuity effect. The discontinuity effect is larger when (a) participants interact with an opponent whose behavior is unconstrained by the experimenter or constrained by the experimenter to be cooperative rather than constrained by the experimenter to be reciprocal, (b) group members make a group decision rather than individual decisions, (c) unconstrained communication between participants is present rather than absent, and (d) conflict of interest is severe rather than mild. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Dynamics of Experimentally Induced Criterion Shifts.

Investigations of decision making have typically assumed stationarity, even though commonly observed "context effects" are dynamic by definition. Mirror effects are an important class of context effects that can be explained by changes in participants' decision criteria. When easy and difficult conditions are blocked alternately and a mirror effect is observed, participants must repeatedly change their decision criteria. The authors investigated the time course of these criterion changes and observed the buildup of mirror effects on a trial-by-trial basis. The data are consistent with slow, systematic changes in decision criteria that lag behind stimulus changes. The length of this lag is considerable: analysis of a simple dynamic signal-detection model suggests participants take an average of around 14 trials to adjust to new decision environments. This trial-level measurement of experimentally induced changes has implications for traditional blockwise analyses of data and for models of decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of depression on social economic decision making.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 119(3) of Journal of Abnormal Psychology (see record 2010-15289-020). In the article, the last revision received date printed on the final page of the article was incorrect due to an error in the production process. The correct publication dates are as follows: Received April 14, 2009; Revision received November 6, 2009; Accepted November 9, 2009.] Although the role of emotion in social economic decision making has been increasingly recognized, the impact of mood disorders, such as depression, on such decisions has been surprisingly neglected. To address this gap, 15 depressed and 23 nondepressed individuals completed a well-known economic task, in which they had to accept or reject monetary offers from other players. Although depressed individuals reported a more negative emotional reaction to unfair offers, they accepted significantly more of these offers than did controls. A positive relationship was observed in the depressed group, but not in controls, between acceptance rates of unfair offers and resting cardiac vagal control, a physiological index of emotion regulation capacity. The discrepancy between depressed individuals' increased emotional reactions to unfair offers and their decisions to accept more of these offers contrasts with recent findings that negative mood in nondepressed individuals can lead to lower acceptance rates. This suggests distinct biasing processes in depression, which may be related to higher reliance on regulating negative emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

I'm better off than most other people: The role of social comparisons for coping with regret in young adulthood and old age.

This longitudinal study was designed to examine the importance of social comparisons for coping with regret among young and older adults. It was expected that making downward social comparisons would be associated with a greater reduction in regret intensity over time among older, compared with young, adults. A total of 104 participants took part in this 4-month longitudinal study. The findings suggest that across different comparison targets, making downward (relative to upward) social comparisons was consistently related to reduced regret intensity over time among older adults. Among young adults, making downward social comparisons with personally known others, as opposed to age peers, was associated with lower regret intensity. In addition, older adults increased their reliance on downward social comparisons over time. This age-differential shift toward downward social comparisons further explained age differences in changes of regret intensity over time. Finally, differences in opportunities to undo regrets explained some of the age differences in the use and adaptive value of downward social comparisons. The implications of the findings for understanding and examining pathways to successful development are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The emergence of coherence over the course of decision making.

Previous research has indicated that decision making is accompanied by an increase in the coherence of assessments of the factors related to the decision alternatives. In the present study, the authors investigated whether this coherence shift is obtained before people commit to a decision, and whether it is obtained in the course of a number of other processing tasks. College students were presented with a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments in isolation before seeing the case and after processing it under various initial sets, including playing the role of a judge assigned to decide the case. Coherence shifts were observed when participants were instructed to delay making the decision (Experiment 1), to memorize the case (Experiment 2), and to comprehend the case (Experiment 3). The findings support the hypothesis that a coherence-generating mechanism operates in a variety of processing tasks, including decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Save angels perhaps": A critical examination of unconscious thought theory and the deliberation-without-attention effect.

Based on Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) and a series of experimental and correlational studies, Dijksterhuis and his colleagues conclude that when making complex choices/decisions, conscious thought--deliberation while attention is directed at the problem--leads to poorer choices/decisions than "unconscious thought"--deliberation in the absence of conscious attention directed at the problem. UTT comprises six principles said to apply to decision making, impression formation, attitude formation and change, problem solving, and creativity. Because the implications of UTT for psychological research and theory are considerable, the authors critically examined these six principles (and the studies used to support them) in light of the extant scholarship on unconscious processes, memory, attention, and social cognition. Our examination reveals that UTT is a theory of the unconscious that fails to take into account important work in cognitive psychology, particularly in the judgment and decision making area. Moreover, established literatures in social psychology that contradict fundamental tenets of UTT and its empirical basis are ignored. The authors conclude that theoretical and experimental deficiencies undermine the claims of the superiority of unconscious thinking as portrayed by UTT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The program in psychology at the United States Air Force Academy.

The attempt has been made to formulate learning outcomes or educational goals for the USAFA courses in psychology in terms of knowledge and understandings, habits and skills, and attitudes and values. 2 courses are outlined: (a) basic psychology which includes consideration of Scientific Method and Measurement, Individual Differences, Growth and Development, Motivation, Emotion, and Perception, Learning and Thinking, and Adjustment and Personality; (b) psychology in the Air Force which includes Engineering Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Leadership, and Problems of Military Adjustment. Conduct of the courses includes the use of "provocative and stimulating examples and illustrative materials" and psychological films are used liberally. "Effort is made to allow all students to have some contact throughout the academic year with each of the seven instructors in the department." Classes are restricted to 12 students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Supplication and appeasement in conflict and negotiation: The interpersonal effects of disappointment, worry, guilt, and regret.

This study examined the social effects of emotions related to supplication and appeasement in conflict and negotiation. In a computer-simulated negotiation, participants in Experiment 1 were confronted with a disappointed or worried opponent (supplication), with a guilty or regretful opponent (appeasement), or with a nonemotional opponent (control). Compared with controls, participants conceded more when the other experienced supplication emotions and conceded less when the other experienced appeasement emotions (especially guilt). Experiment 2 replicated the effects of disappointment and guilt and showed that they are moderated by the perceiver's dispositional trust: Negotiators high in trust conceded more to a disappointed counterpart than to a happy one, but those with low trust were unaffected. In Experiment 3, trust was manipulated through information about the other's personality (cooperative vs. competitive), and a similar moderation was obtained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aspects of endowment: A query theory of value construction.

How do people judge the monetary value of objects? One clue is provided by the typical endowment study (D. Kahneman, J. L. Knetsch, & R. H. Thaler, 1991), in which participants are randomly given either a good, such as a coffee mug, that they may later sell ("sellers") or a choice between the good and amounts of cash ("choosers"). Sellers typically demand at least twice as much as choosers, inconsistent with economic theory. This result is usually explained by an increased weighting of losses, or loss aversion. The authors provide a memory-based account of endowment, suggesting that people construct values by posing a series of queries whose order differs for sellers and choosers. Because of output interference, these queries retrieve different aspects of the object and the medium of exchange, producing different valuations. The authors show that the content and structure of the recalled aspects differ for selling and choosing and that these aspects predict valuations. Merely altering the order in which queries are posed can eliminate the endowment effect, and changing the order of queries can produce endowment-like effects without ownership. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)