Regret And Undoing: Retrospective Assessment Of Hypothetical And Real Life Events (decision, Emotion, Cognition).

Abstract

This investigation, arising from within the cognitive tradition instigated by Festinger and renewed by Kahneman and Tversky, includes conceptual and empirical analyses of regret and undoing. I wanted to know how people think and feel about hypothetical and real life experiences, how they imagine possible alternative experiences, and how their thoughts about the past relate to characteristics of the events and to personal characteristics. To examine these questions, I carried out a set of experimental studies, a set of survey studies, and a conceptual analysis. The conceptual analysis consists of semantic and theoretical explications of regret and undoing, and differentiation of these concepts from similar concepts, namely, remorse, guilt, and shame. The purpose of the experimental studies was to determine which general classes of events (acts versus failures to act, negative versus positive outcomes, usual versus unusual acts, foreseeable versus unforeseeable events) are most often mentally undone. Subjects read written vignettes in which the nature of the antecedent events was varied. Subjects were asked either to (a) imagine the intensity of the emotional reaction of a target person or to (b) undo the outcome by imagining alternative antecedent events. The principal results of these experiments indicate that: (1) given the same regretted outcome, people imagine regretting acts more than failures to act; (2) likewise, given a happy outcome, people imagine feeling better about antecedent acts than failures to act, though this effect is less pronounced than the parallel effect for negative outcomes; (3) antecedent events with a causal, foreseeable connection to the outcome are undone more often than elements not foreseeable related to the outcome; (4) unusual antecedent events are undone more often than usual ones. The purpose of the survey study was to examine the incidence and content of mental undoing of real life events in groups of undergraduates and older adults. The results of this study indicate that: (1) undoing is a common mental activity in undergraduates and older adults; (2) females show a greater incidence of undoing thoughts than males, particularly in life domains considered stereotypically feminine (e.g., family); and (3) this sex difference disappears when occupational and educational situation is held constant across gender.