52 ( 2006 ): 726 – 40.
fallacy can be overcome : Darrin R. Lehman, Richard O. Lempert, and
Richard E. Nisbett, “The Effects of Graduate Training on Reasoning:
Formal Discipline and Thinking about Everyday-Life Events,” American
Psychologist 43 ( 1988 ): 431 – 42.
“a sinking feeling” : Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters, “A Theory of
Regret Regulation 1. 0 ,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 17 ( 2007 ): 3 –
18.
regret to normality : Kahneman and Miller, “Norm Theory.”
habitually taking unreasonable risks : The hitchhiker question was
inspired by a famous example discussed by the legal philosophers Hart
and Honoré: “A woman married to a man who suffers from an ulcerated
condition of the stomach might identify eating parsnips as the cause of his
indigestion. The doctor might identify the ulcerated condition as the cause
and the meal as a mere occasion.” Unusual events call for causal
explanations and also evoke counterfactual thoughts, and the two are
closely related. The same event can be compared to either a personal
norm or the norm of other people, leading to different counterfactuals,
different causal attributions, and different emotions (regret or blame):
Herbert L. A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Causation in the Law (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985 ), 33.
remarkably uniform : Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “The
Simulation Heuristic,” in Judgment Under Uncertainty : Heuristics and
Biases , ed. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982 ), 160 – 73.
applies to blame : Janet Landman, “Regret and Elation Following Action
and Inaction: Affective Responses to Positive Versus Negative
Outcomes,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 13 ( 1987 ): 524 –
36. Faith Gleicher et al., “The Role of Counterfactual Thinking in Judgment
of Affect,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 16 ( 1990 ): 284 – 95.
actions that deviate from the default : Dale T. Miller and Brian R. Taylor,
“Counterfactual Thought, Regret, and Superstition: How to Avoid Kicking
Yourself,” in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of
Counterfactual Thinking , ed. Neal J. Roese and James M. Olson
(Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995 ), 305 – 31.
produce blame and regret : Marcel Zeelenberg, Kees van den Bos, Eric
van Dijk, and Rik Pieters, “The Inaction Effect in the Psychology of Regret,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82 ( 2002 ): 314 – 27.
brand names over generics : Itamar Simonson, “The Influence of
Anticipating Regret and Responsibility on Purchase Decisions,” Journal of