On the psychology of ‘if only’: Regret and the comparison between factual and counterfactual outcomes

Abstract

People experience regret when they realize that they would have been better off had they decided differently. Hence, a central element in regret is the comparability of a decision outcome with the outcomes forgone. Up to now, however, the comparison process that is so essential to the experience of regret has not been the subject of psychological research. In this article, we tune in on the comparison dependency of regret. We argue that factors that reduce the tendency to compare attenuate regret, and demonstrate that uncertainty about counterfactual outcomes (Experiment 1), and incomparability of counterfactual and factual outcomes (Experiments 2 and 3) produce such effects.