How Does the Presence of a Social Other Affect the Perception of Emotions? A Preliminary Report

Regret is an emotion that may be experienced by a decision-maker that learns that an alternative choice would have led to a better outcome. How the presence of a social other affects a decision maker’s perception of regret is still an open question. Zeelenberg and Pieters (2004) asked subjects to describe the emotions they thought they would experience in hypothetical situations involving lotteries. In the Netherlands there is a special type of lottery, the Postcode Lottery, where postal code numbers are randomly drawn and all the residents living in that postal code area share the prize, conditioned that they have purchased a ticket. The results showed a clear increase in the regret ratings in the situations involving the Postcode Lottery where it was said that a “neighbor” had won the prize. Boles and Messick (1995) found that when a “social other” receives the payoff yielded by a foregone option, the alternative outcome becomes a more salient reference point, thus, acquiring more relevance when one evaluates his own payoff. Subjects were asked to evaluate how much satisfaction and regret they thought an imaginary player would feel in a two-gamble choice game. In that scenario, a “social other” always choose the option overlooked by the player. Regret should be elicited when the judged player does worse than the other player. However, only satisfaction ratings were affected due to the presence of a “social other”: subjects evaluations of the regret experienced by the player were not significantly affected.