Looking Forward to Looking Backward

Decisions are powerfully affected by anticipated regret, and people anticipate feeling more regret when they lose by a narrow margin than when they lose by a wide margin. But research suggests that people are remarkably good at avoiding self-blame, and hence they may be better at avoiding regret than they realize. Four studies measured people’s anticipations and experiences of regret and self-blame. In Study 1, students overestimated how much more regret they would feel when they “nearly won” than when they “clearly lost” a contest. In Studies 2, 3a, and 3b, subway riders overestimated how much more regret and self-blame they would feel if they “nearly caught” their trains than if they “clearly missed” their trains. These results suggest that people are less susceptible to regret than they imagine, and that decision makers who pay to avoid future regrets may be buying emotional insurance that they do not actually need. “Inside we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life.” Rick to Ilsa, Casablanca (1943) Most people have been on that runway at one time or another, and, like Ilsa, most have boarded the plane. People's most consequential choices—whether to marry, have children, buy a house, enter a profession, or move abroad—are so often made out of fear of regret that students of decision making have focused more attention on this particular combination of disappointment and self-blame than on all other emotions combined (Bell, 1982; Landman, 1993; Loomes & Sugden, 1982; Zeelenberg, van Dijk, Manstead, & van der Pligt, 1998). Research has demonstrated the pervasive impact of anticipated regret on people’s decisions, and has identified some of the circumstances under which people expect to feel especially regretful. For example, people expect to feel more regret when they act foolishly than when they fail to act wisely (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995), when they learn about alternatives to their bad choices than when they do not (Ritov & Baron, 1995, 1996; Zeelenberg, 1999a), when they accept bad advice than when they reject good advice (Crawford, McConnell, Lewis, & Sherman, 2002), when their bad choices are unusual rather than conventional (Simonson, 1992), and when they fail by a narrow margin rather than by a wide margin (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995). What ties these circumstances together? As Zeelenberg (1999b, p. 326) noted, “Regret is the negative, cognitively based emotion that we experience when realizing or imagining that our present situation would have been better had we acted differently.” In other words, regret is a counterfactual emotion (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) that occurs when one recognizes that a negative outcome was caused by one’s own actions, and, indeed, self-blame is the critical element that distinguishes regret from closely related emotions such as disappointment (Zeelenberg, van Dijk, & Manstead, 1998). Because self-blame is a key ingredient in the recipe for regret, it is only natural that people should expect regret to be exacerbated by factors that highlight their personal responsibility for negative outcomes. So, for example, when one misses an airplane by just a few minutes or a gold medal by just a few meters, it is all too easy to imagine how a small change in one’s own behavior might have changed the outcome (Miller & Gunasegaram, 1990; Roese, 1997). People expect a narrow margin of loss—or a “near miss”—to exacerbate self-blame, and thus they expect that margin to exacerbate regret as well. These expectations may be wrong. Research suggests that people routinely overestimate the emotional impact of negative events ranging from professional failures and romantic breakups to electoral losses, sports defeats, and medical setbacks (for recent reviews, see Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999; Gilbert, Driver-Linn, & Wilson, 2002; Loewenstein & Schkade, 1999; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). One of the reasons for this is that people do not realize how readily they will rationalize negative outcomes once they occur. For instance, Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, and Wheatley (1998) asked participants to predict how they would feel a few minutes after receiving negative personality feedback from a team of seasoned clinicians or from an experimental computer program, and participants expected to feel equally unhappy in the two cases. They did not feel as unhappy as they had predicted, but more important, they felt even less unhappy when they received the feedback from a computer than when they received it from a team of clinicians. Personality feedback is more easily rationalized when it comes from an unreliable source, of course, and although participants quickly capitalized on this fact after they received the feedback, they did not seem to recognize it in prospect. One of the reasons why people expect to feel more regret when they fail by a narrow margin than when they fail by a wide margin is that they expect to blame themselves more in the former instance. But if people avoid self-blame with relative ease, then the size of the margin should have little or no impact on the experience of regret. We sought to investigate this possibility in four studies. In Studies 1 and 2, participants predicted how much regret and disappointment they would feel, or reported how much regret and disappointment they actually felt, after failing to win a prize (Study 1) or failing to catch a train (Study 2) by either a narrow or a wide margin. Because regret involves self-blame and disappointment does not, we hypothesized that participants would expect the margin of loss to influence their experiences of regret but not their experiences of disappointment. However, because people are better at avoiding self-blame than they realize, we hypothesized that the margin of loss would not influence the actual experience of either emotion. In Studies 3a and 3b, participants either predicted or reported their counterfactual thoughts or their feelings of responsibility after missing a train. We hypothesized that participants would expect the margin of loss to influence their feelings of self-blame, but that, in fact, it would not. STUDY 1: REGRET IN THE LABORATORY