Behavioural consequences of regret and disappointment in social bargaining games

Abstract

Previous research on the role of negative emotions in social bargaining games has focused primarily on social emotions such as anger and guilt. In this article, we provide a test for behavioural differences between two prototypical decision-related negative emotions—regret and disappointment—in one-shot social dilemma games. Three experiments with two different emotion-induction procedures (autobiographical recall and imagined scenarios) and two different games (the ultimatum game and the 10-coin give-some game) revealed that regret increased prosocial behaviour, whereas disappointment decreased prosocial behaviour. These results extend previous findings concerning differences between regret and disappointment to interdependent (social) situations.

Keywords:

• Regret
• Disappointment
• Prosocial behaviour
• Social dilemmas

Acknowledgements

This research is based on the dissertation of the first author, supported by a grant from the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal—SFRH/BD/40990/2008.

We thank the Associate Editor, Agneta Fischer, and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We also thank Patricia Palma, Aristides Ferreira and Paula Costa Ferreira for giving us access to participants for conducting Experiments 2 and 3.