ABSTRACT
When deciding what to do, we often think about the consequences of our actions and evaluate their attractiveness and likelihood of occurrence. Our choices are then at least partly based on these appraisals. However, when decisions are important enough, we also tend to think about how we would evaluate our outcomes in light of the outcomes forgone. This has sometimes been referred to as prefactual thinking (e.g., Sanna, 1996). For example, when choosing to invest all our savings in risky stocks, we may envision the situation that the stock market crashes and compare that outcome to the alternative in which our money would have been securely placed in a savings account. In turn, entertaining such prefactual thoughts arouses emotions In this particular example, one could already feel the regret on learning that the savings account would have dramatically outperformed the stock market investment. This feeling of potential regret concerning future worlds is often called anticipated regret or anticipatory regret. More than two decades of research have shown that when this type of regret is elicited, it can exert a strong influence on our behavior (for a review, see Zeelenberg, 1999 a). More specifically, decision makers tend to regulate their regrets, such that they behave in a way that allows them to avoid experiencing this emotion in the future In this chapter, we review what we have learned over these years and what remains to be learned, and we do so by presenting our attempt to formulate a theory of regret that integrates these observations and delineates opportunities for future research We first address what regret is before turning to the effects of its anticipation.
