Sunny Side Up: How Regret Leads to Defensive Optimis

As one of the negative emotions most tightly related to decision-making, regret has proved an important topic for consumer behavior research (e.g., Simonson 1992, Inman and Zeelenberg 2002). People are strongly motivated to avoid or decrease it and the regulation strategies they implement may have strong influence on their judgments, decisions and behaviors. This research illustrates how optimism may represent a defense mechanism against regret when the outcome of the regretful decision is still pending and uncertain. Although most research on regret examine situations where the negative emotion results from a disappointing outcome, a decision process, independently from its outcome, can also trigger regret, when it is not judged as sensible and wise, i.e. justifiable (Connolly and Zeelenberg 2002, Pieters and Zeelenberg 2005). Pre-outcome regret can emerge after neglecting some topics while preparing for an exam or investing in highly risky financial products, even before knowing the academic exam questions, or the performance of the chosen financial products. Research has already documented strategies that people may implement to mitigate their post-outcome regret (Zeelenberg and Pieters 2007) but much less is known about regulation strategies of pre-outcome regret. We propose that, when there is a delay between the decision and its outcome, regretful people are optimistic about the outcome of the wrongful decision compared to non-regretful people, as a strategy to cope with self-blame. Furthermore, this regret-induced defensive optimism correlates with potentially harmful behavioral intentions such as decreased willingness to alter and improve future similar decisions. However we show that severity of decision consequences is a boundary condition for defensive optimism. When the consequences at stakes loom larger, pre-outcome regret do not optimistically distort expectation any longer.