Are regret and disappointment differentially associated with norm compliant and norm deviant failures?

Abstract

People compare actual decision outcomes with what might, could, or should have been, and they experience negative emotions when the foregone outcomes are better. We hypothesised that the normativity of a decision, whether it is norm-compliant or norm-deviant, also shapes emotional experiences to the outcomes. We expected that norm-deviant decisions would result in more regret than disappointment, because there would be more blame associated with norm-deviant decisions. We expected that norm-compliant decisions would result in more disappointment than regret, because norm-compliant decisions would be associated with higher expectancies. In five pre-registered experiments (N₁ = 332, N₂ = 334, N₃ = 338, N₄ = 1284, N₅ = 347), participants read about norm-compliant or norm-deviant investment decisions, and were asked to rate how much regret and disappointment the person in the vignette (or they themselves in Experiment 5) would feel. Consistent with the hypotheses, norm compliance was associated with more disappointment than regret and norm deviance was associated with more regret than disappointment, though the effect sizes were small (M_r = 0.14). We also found evidence for that norm-deviant failures in general engender more negative emotional reactions than their norm-compliant counterparts.