Regret In Decision Making

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introduction Past research has laid the foundations for the assumption that people take into account the emotional response to a possible outcome when making a decision (e.g., Janis & Mann, 1977). When the idea of regret is brought to the attention of the decision maker in the time the decision is made, regret will become more salient in the decision making process (Zeelenberg, 1999). Regret is defined as “the emotion that we experience when realizing or imagining that our current situation would have been better, if only we had decided differently” (Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2007, 3). Regret has important influences on consumer behavior, such as risk aversion (Zeelenberg), satisfaction, and brand switching (Bui, Krishen, & Bates, 2011). In a study…show more content…
Across these problems, the influences of feedback and regret were prominent. participants were exposed to feedback regarding what they received and what they could have received had they chosen a different action. In these trials, feedback led participants to feel regret when they chose the less profitable payoff, and in turn, they tended to alternate their selection to minimize the probability of regret, specifically, short-term…show more content…
Wakslak and Trope (2009) examined the effect of construal levels on probability judgments. Findings of several construal level manipulations suggest that construal level acts as a cue used to inform probability judgments. Specifically, these findings suggest that people judge an event as less likely to occur after they have been led to adopt a high-level-construal mind-set, rather than a low-level-construal mind-set. Accordingly, in one study, construal level was primed by having participants in both construal conditions work on a task involving the activity ‘‘improve and maintain good health.’’; Participants in the high-level-construal condition connected this activity to increasingly abstract goals by answering a series of ‘‘why?’’ questions, whereas participants in the low-level-construal condition connected this activity to increasingly concrete activities by answering a series of ‘‘how?’’ questions. As expected, participants in the high-level-construal condition made lower probability judgments of events than did those in the low-level construal

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