An Experimental Decision-Making Paradigm to Distinguish Guilt and Regret and Their Self-Regulating Function via Loss Averse Choice Behavior

نویسندگان

  • Ullrich Wagner
  • Lisa Handke
  • Denise Dörfel
  • Henrik Walter
چکیده

Both guilt and regret typically result from counterfactual evaluations of personal choices that caused a negative outcome and are thought to regulate human decisions by people's motivation to avoid these emotions. Despite these similarities, studies asking people to describe typical situations of guilt and regret identified the social dimension as a fundamental distinguishing factor, showing that guilt but not regret specifically occurs for choices in interpersonal (social) contexts. However, an experimental paradigm to investigate this distinction systematically by inducing emotions of guilt and regret online is still missing. Here, extending existing procedures, we introduce such a paradigm, in which participants choose in each trial between two lotteries, with the outcome of the chosen lottery (gain or loss) being either assigned to themselves (intrapersonal trials) or to another person (interpersonal trials). After results of both the chosen and the unchosen lottery were shown, subjects rated how they felt about the outcome, including ratings of guilt and regret. Trait Guilt (TG) was determined for all participants in order to take their general inclination to experience guilt into account. Results confirmed that guilt but not regret specifically occurred in an interpersonal context. Percentages of loss averse choices (choosing the lottery with the lower possible monetary loss) were determined as indicators of regulation via guilt and regret avoidance. High TG scorers generally made more loss averse choices than low TG scorers, while trial-by-trial analyses showed that low TG scorers used their feelings of guilt more specifically to avoid the same emotional experience in subsequent choices. Our results confirm the social dimension as the critical factor distinguishing guilt from regret and identify TG as an important moderator determining the way in which guilt vs. regret can regulate their own occurrence by influencing choice strategies.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Risk premiums and certainty equivalents of loss-averse newsvendors of bounded utility

Loss-averse behavior makes the newsvendors avoid the losses more than seeking the probable gains as the losses have more psychological impact on the newsvendor than the gains. In economics and decision theory, the classical newsvendor models treat losses and gains equally likely, by disregarding the expected utility when the newsvendor is loss-averse. Moreover, the use of unbounded utility to m...

متن کامل

Role Taking Under Financial Risk Decision Making

This paper explores people’s behavior when they are facing financial risks. Through the setting of an economics experiment, people’s willingness to bear financial risks and their tendency to impose risks on others are investigated. The experiment result shows that most people are risk-neutral or risk-averse when making decision under financial environment, and their tendency to impose risks on ...

متن کامل

اثر القای شفقت خود و حرمت خود بر میزان تجربه شرم و گناه

Abstract The present study investigated the effect of inducing self-compassion and self-esteem on regulating shame and guilt by the experimental method. Eighty students of University of Tehran (26 males, 54 females) completed the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), and the Shame-Proneness and Guilt-Proneness subscales of Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA). ...

متن کامل

Measuring nonlinear and heterogeneous guilt aversion ”

Recent experiments suggest that people’s preferences not only depend on their choices but also on their beliefs of other people’s choices and on their beliefs of other people’s beliefs. Guilt aversion is such belief-dependent preference that has received a lot of attention recently. An individual is considered to be guilt averse if he gets a negative utility from failing to live up to the belie...

متن کامل

A Self-regulating Information Acquisition Algorithm for Preventing Choice Regret in Multi-perspective Decision Making

Francisco J. Santos-Arteaga, Debora Di Caprio, Madjid Tavana A Self-regulating Information Acquisition Algorithm for Preventing Choice Regret in Multi-perspective Decision Making In a world filled with an increasing number of choices people must carefully select the information they acquire in order to make sound decisions that they will not regret in the future. This ranges from everyday life ...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره 3  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2012