Students’ Value Orientations, Intuitive Decision Making, and Motivational Interference, and Their Relations to Regret

Abstract

Students’ learning activities frequently compete with their leisure options, leading to regret after decisions to study. Using a sample of 233 German and 194 Australian undergraduate students, the authors explored possible determinants of the personality construct regret. They investigated whether the level to which students rely on intuition in decision making is negatively connected to the tendency to regret a decision and whether the degree to which during studying students are distracted by leisure incentives (motivational interference) is positively related to regret. Students’ achievement and well-being value orientations are expected to be linked to intuition and interference. In both samples, interference was positively related to regret whereas intuition was negatively related to regret only in the German sample. The authors did not find the expected link between intuition and interference. In both samples, value orientations were related, as expected, to intuition and interference. Regret could possibly be reduced if motivational interference is avoided.