The consequences of doing nothing: Inaction inertia as avoidance of anticipated counterfactual regret.

Abstract

When an attractive action opportunity has been forgone, individuals tend to decline a substantially less attractive current opportunity in the same action domain, even though, in an absolute sense, it still has positive value. The hypothesis that continued inaction (inaction inertia ) occurs in the service of avoiding anticipated regret was tested. In Experiments 1 and 2, when repeated contact with the forgone opportunity (and, hence, the experience of regret) was made unavoidable, the tendency toward subsequent inaction decreased. The inaction inertia effect was also reduced when avoidance costs were increased (Experiment 3) or when the initial reason for avoidance was removed (Experiment 4). Experiment 4 included a thought-listing task that provided direct evidence for the role of regret in producing inaction inertia. The things that people do not do far outnumber the things that they do. Although the effects of actions on subsequent actions have been the subject of a great deal of psychological research, however, investigations into the consequences of nonaction or inaction have only recently become a research topic of interest, q'~kocinski, Pittmun, and Tuttle (1995) outlined the potential benefits of an explicit study of the effects of inaction and presented the results of several studies on one particular consequence of inaction: inaction inertia. Inaction inertia occurs when forgoing an attractive action opportunity (initial inaction) decreases the likelihood that subsequent action will be taken in the same domain. The research on this phenomenon shows that inaction inertia occurs when the second action opportunity is in some sense worth substantially less than the initial opportunity, even though the current action opportunity still has positive value in an absolute sense. Having passed up one opportunity to gain, the person becomes more likely to pass up another opportunity to gain but gain less. For example, in Tykocinski et al.'s (1995) Experiment 2, the participants were asked, in a scenario methodology, how likely they would be to join a frequent flier program before a trip they were currently planing to take, The number of miles that could be gained by joining at the time was the same for all of the research participants. In the two experimental conditions, the effects of a previous inaction were manipulated. The participant was said to have considered joining this program once before