The development of the experience and anticipation of regret

Abstract

Although recent studies have established that children experience regret from around 6 years, we do not yet know when the ability to anticipate this emotion emerges, despite the importance of the anticipation of regret in decision-making. We examined whether children will anticipate they will feel regret if they were to find out in a box-choosing game that, had they made a different choice, they would have obtained a better prize. Experiment 1 replicated Guttentag and Ferrell's study in which children were asked what they hoped was in a non-chosen box. Even 8- to 9-year olds find this question difficult. However, when asked what might make them feel sadder, 7- to 8-year olds (but not younger children) predicted that finding the larger prize in the unchosen box would make them feel this way. In Experiments 2 and 3, children predicted how they would feel if the unchosen box contained either a larger or smaller prize, in order to examine anticipation of both regret and of relief. Although 6- to 7-year olds do experience regret when they find out they could have won a better prize, they do not correctly anticipate feeling this way. By around 8 years, the majority of children are able to anticipate both regret and relief.

Keywords:

• Regret
• Counterfactuals
• Development

We are grateful to Ciara Gallagher, Rachel McAllister, Sinead McCartan, Emma Berry, Rachael McBride and Brónach O'Brien for assistance with data collection.

This research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK [grant number ES/K000411/1].

We are grateful to Ciara Gallagher, Rachel McAllister, Sinead McCartan, Emma Berry, Rachael McBride and Brónach O'Brien for assistance with data collection.

This research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK [grant number ES/K000411/1].

Notes

¹ O'Connor et al. (2012) and Van Duijvenvoorde et al. (2013) found that administering this trial first increased the possibility that children experienced regret, possibly because this trial sets up the expectation, subsequently disconfirmed when the unchosen box is opened, that all boxes contain one token; however, it should be noted that the age patterns for experienced regret found by O'Connor et al. are not dependent on trial order.

² There was a small minority of children (N = 7) who reported feeling sadder on the regret trial but happier on the baseline trial. There are two ways of interpreting this pattern of performance: it may be that these children feel relief on the baseline trial because they could not have obtained a better prize (O'Connor et al., 2012, in press). Alternatively, it may be that these children have a general tendency to shift their response. We believe that the former interpretation is more likely because we have found this tendency to increase with age (O'Connor et al., 2012, and see Figure 2); thus, we classify these children as experiencing regret. Note that the majority of children in each age group remain categorised as experiencing regret even if we were to re-classify these seven children as failing the task.