Regular ArticleAre Actions Regretted More Than Inactions?☆,☆☆,★,★★,☆☆☆,★★★
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This article was based in part on a doctoral disertation submitted to the University of Washington. A preliminary report was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Judgment and Decision Making Society, St. Louis, November 1994. The authors thank Drs. Beth Kerr, Caroline Mangelsdorf, Maryanne Garry, Kimihiko Yamagishi, Karl Teigan, Anthony Greenwald, Keith Dveirin, and Janet Landman for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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The word “abnormal” is used here without the connotations of deviant psychology. In other words, in the technical sense, it is abnormal to brush your teeth in the morning if you usually brush your teeth only at night.
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We note that the association between type of regret and self-characterization of typical regrets does not necessarily indicate that participants who recalled action regrets or inaction regrets were systematically different, for the association could be the result of an availability bias. The self-characterization followed the recall of a regretted event and the classification of the regret as an action or inaction. The writing or thinking about a regret and the act of classifying the event as an action or inaction could have primed the participant to characterize himself or herself as someone who typically has regrets of this same type. Our second experiment contains controls to avoid this alternative explanation.
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Landman. (personal communication) pointed out that the regrets that were presented as examples to the participants introduced a confound into the experimental design. To regret the buying of a stock whose value drops is to regret a loss, whereas to regret the failure to buy a stock whose value increases is to regret a missed opportunity, or failure to gain. Might not this difference between an example of a loss and an example of a failure to gain account for differences in the intensity of action and inaction regrets that participants recalled? In reply, we first note that this confound should enhance the intensity of action regrets over inaction regrets because the example of a loss due to an action should suggest more intense regrets than the example of a failure to gain due to an inaction. If this confound were influencing our data, the unconfounded effect of actions would be smaller than the observed effect and the unconfounded effect of inactions would be larger than the observed effect. In other words, the confound should lend spurious support to the claim that actions are regretted more intensely than inactions, a claim that we are attempting to refute. Given that our data showed no differences between the intensities of naturally occurring action and inaction regrets, one may infer that if this confound did affect our data, the true state must be that inaction regrets are more intense on the average than action regrets, an even stronger refutation of the claim that actions are regretted more intensely than inactions. The preference literature shows that losses produce larger absolute changes in value than do objectively equivalent gains (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991), but not that mentioning a loss of unspecified magnitude leads to recall of more intensely felt regrets than does mentioning a failure to gain that is also of unspecified magnitude. Hence, it is not at all clear that regrets of differing intensities are retrieved when one mentions an unspecified loss versus an unspecified failure to gain as an example of possible regrets. Indeed, we are rather skeptical that this could occur and intend to test the question empirically in a follow-up study. Here, however, our point is that even if this effect occurred, it would lead to an even stronger denial of the claim that actions are regretted more than inactions.
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The discrepancy between the two analyses was due to the 29 observations that were classifed differently by the coders and participants. Without attempting to describe these differences exhaustively, we note that the 11 observations that were coded as actions by participants and as inactions by the coders had a mean of 4.18, and the 8 observations that were coded as inactions by the participants and as actions by the coders had a mean of 5.75. Because 4.18 was lower than the participants' action mean and 5.75 was higher than the participants' inaction mean, reclassifying these observations as inactions and actions, respectively, increased the difference between the action and inaction means.
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Under the coders' classification, data were excluded if (a) the participant failed to rate the regret intensity of either the first or the second regret (typically an oversight); or (b) if the coders disagreed on the classification of the first or second regret; or (c) if the regret as classified by the coders was inappropriate for the experimental condition, e.g., if the coders classified the regret as an inaction but the regret was the first regret produced in Recall Condition 2 (action regrets first). Data were excluded under the participants' classification only if the data failed the first criterion (a). Despite the difference in sampling criteria, the effects of the action/inaction distinction were virtually identical under either the participants' or the coders' classification of the regrets.
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Address correspondence and reprint requests to Julie Feldman, University of Arizona, Department of Psychology, Room 312, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected].