Anticipatory Regret: Trying to Avoid a Mental Kicking

ANTICIPATORY REGRET: TRYING TO AVOID A MENTAL KICKING

Biased recall of past experience can lead people to misjudge the likelihood that a particular course of action will lead to a negative outcome. Biasing subjective expectancies, however, is only one of the ways that counterfactual regret can affect decision-making strategies. Counterfactual regret can also influence decision strategies through its impact on the decision maker’s subjective utility function: how he or she evaluates the different possible outcomes. The more counterfactual regret an outcome is expected to generate, the more motivated the decision maker is to avoid the outcome. This account implies that one need not look to biased experiential memory to explain superstitious behavior. People might hesitate to engage in certain “irrational” actions, not because of an unrealistic estimate of the likelihood of a negative event ensuing, but because of a (quite possibly) realistic estimate of the psychological pain that a particular action–outcome sequence might cause them. That regret can be anticipated and can guide the decisions people make has been proposed by theorists from a wide range of theoretic orientations (Bell, 1982, 1983, 1985a; Fishburn, 1983; Janis & Mann, 1977; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a; Loomes, 1988; Loomes & Sugden, 1982, 1987a, 1987b; Simonson, 1992; Sugden, 1985; Walster, Walster, Piliavin, & Schmidt, 1973; see also Gleicher, Boninger, Strathman, Armor, Hetts, & Ahn, 1995).

An illustration of how anticipatory regret can guide decisions is the Spanish prohibition against matadors switching bulls. One need not posit that matadors and their fans exaggerate the likelihood that switching bulls will lead to misfortune to account for why such behavior is proscribed. It is sufficient to propose that misfortunes following mutable actions are judged more aversive (see also Gilovich, Medvec, & Chen, 1995; Ritov & Baron, 1990, 1992; Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991). Regardless of whether switching bulls is more or less likely to lead to misfortune, any misfortune that does follow a switch can be expected to generate more distress among fans and victims alike. A similar point can be made about the advice to a person to follow his or her first instinct on multiple-choice tests. Students need not think that changing answers increases the risk of a lowered score to avoid doing so. If a student anticipates being tormented by having changed a correct answer to a wrong one, he or she might reasonably ask, “Why risk it?”

Because circumstances that elicit anticipatory regret also tend to induce biased recall estimates, the assessment of the independent effects of anticipatory regret is difficult. Nevertheless, there do seem to be some instances of superstitious behavior for which a biased-memory account seems highly implausible. Consider the psychology captured by the following sportswriter’s observation: “It is a cardinal rule in basketball that when the game is on the line, you don’t put your opponent there. That’s why coaches repeatedly impress their players that they should refrain from committing fouls under circumstances that could give game-winning free shots to the other team” (Goldaper, 1990, p. C46). Why exactly is this a cardinal rule? Might it be a cardinal rule simply because a loss that results from your opponent’s free shot – a shot that you in some sense caused – provokes more haunting counterfactual thoughts than a loss that results from a shot that is less capable of being mentally undone? If so, how many basketball losses occur because players and coaches would rather lose by playing too conservatively (erring by omission) than by playing too aggressively (erring by commission)?