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Predicting with your head, not your heart: Forecasting errors and the impact of anticipated versus experienced elements of regret on well-being

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“One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.”—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish.

Abstract

Research suggests that when predicting our future emotions, affective forecasting errors are frequent (Wilson and Gilbert in Adv Exp Soc Psychol 35:345–411, 2003), influence motivation (Wilson and Gilbert in Curr Dir Psychol Sci 14:131–134, 2005), and drive decisions and behaviors (Dunn and Laham Affective forecasting: a user’s guide to emotional time travel, Psychology Press, London, 2006). Regret can fall prey to these same errors (Gilbert et al., in Psychol Sci 15:346–350, 2004). Recent research characterizes two distinct components of regret: an affective element and cognitive element associated with maladaptive and functional outcomes, respectively (Buchanan et al., in Judgment and Decision Making 11:275–286, 2006). We explored forecasting of these elements across two studies. In Study 1, we investigated how accurately individuals forecast each component of regret, and how this relates to well-being. Participants forecasted experiencing a greater amount of regret (including affective and cognitive components) than they actually experienced. Additionally, forecasted (compared to experienced) components of regret uniquely predicted well-being outcomes, suggesting that predicting more affective regret coincides with lower well-being. In Study 2, forecasting errors in overall regret were eliminated by asking participants to focus on cognitive elements of regret prior to forecasting.

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Notes

  1. The number of participants suggested for our studies was determined by a priori power analyses (Gpower: Faul et al. 2007). Results indicated that a sample size of 52 for Study 1 and 72 for Study 2 would be sufficient to obtain a power of 0.80 and an alpha of 0.05. Sample sizes included in the analyses were near or exceeded these recommendation in the current work.

  2. Although this overall well-being factor score serves as the primary measure of well-being, parallel analyses for each of the individual sub-measures produced similar results.

  3. In both Study 1 (85 stayed, 14 switched) and Study 2 (20 stayed, 4 switched), the decisions that participants made during the Monty Hall Game suggest that participants were not familiar with the game, given that a majority (85%) of participants used a suboptimal strategy. Furthermore, in both Study 1 and Study 2, the decision to stay or switch was unrelated to both forecasts and experiences of the elements of regret (and total regret) as measured by the RES (all ps > 0.13), although such null results should be interpreted with caution given the current sample sizes.

  4. Although within-subjects designs are typically more powerful than between-subjects designs, it is possible that the act of making forecasts could alter participants’ experiences of regret, or that participants could remember their forecasted responses and seek to display consistency by giving similar answers when asked about their experiences. To combat these potential limitations, we also collected data from a separate group of participants (n = 49) that did not provide forecasts, but simply experienced the negative event and provided ratings of their current levels of regret following these experiences. This design provided us with the opportunity to examine between-group differences. Specifically, we examined whether differences exist between forecasts and experiences, without the possibility that experiences were influenced by the act of forecasting itself (see Gilbert et al. 2004, for a similar procedure). We conducted an independent samples t-test comparing the forecasts of our participants with the experiences of a separate group of individuals who only experienced the event. In line with the within-subjects comparison and consistent with Hypothesis 1A, we again found evidence for the impact bias, with forecasts (M = 4.22, SD = 0.94) of overall regret (RES-T) being rated as significantly more intense than experiences (M = 3.52, SD = 1.44), t(98) = 2.88, p = 0.005, d = 0.58, 95% CI [0.21, 1.18]. That is, forecasters expected to feel more regret than a different group of experiencers reported feeling.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, 98926, USA

    Tonya M. Buchanan, Joshua Buchanan & Kylie R. Kadey

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Buchanan, T.M., Buchanan, J. & Kadey, K.R. Predicting with your head, not your heart: Forecasting errors and the impact of anticipated versus experienced elements of regret on well-being. Motiv Emot 43, 971–984 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09772-y

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