School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading.
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University.
Psychol Sci. 2021 Feb;32(2):241-255. doi: 10.1177/0956797620963615. Epub 2021 Jan 13.
After you make a decision, it is sometimes possible to seek information about how things would be if you had acted otherwise. We investigated the lure of this counterfactual information, namely, . In a set of five experiments (total = 150 adults), we used an adapted Balloon Analogue Risk Task with varying costs of information. At a cost, people were willing to seek information about how much they could have won, even though it had little utility and a negative emotional impact (i.e., it led to regret). We explored the downstream effects of seeking information on emotion, behavior adjustment, and ongoing performance, showing that it has little or even negative performance benefit. We also replicated the findings with a large-sample ( = 361 adults) preregistered experiment that excluded possible alternative explanations. This suggests that information about counterfactual alternatives has a strong motivational lure-people simply cannot help seeking it.
做出决定后，有时可以获取有关如果采取其他行动情况会如何的信息。我们研究了这种反事实信息的吸引力，即 。在五组实验中（总计 150 名成年人），我们使用了一种经过改编的气球模拟风险任务，其中信息的成本不同。人们愿意付出代价来获取有关自己可能赢得多少的信息，即使这几乎没有实用价值且会产生负面情绪影响（即，会导致遗憾）。我们探讨了寻求信息对情绪、行为调整和持续表现的下游影响，表明它对表现几乎没有或甚至有负面影响。我们还使用一个排除了可能的替代解释的大型样本（ = 361 名成年人）预注册实验复制了这些发现。这表明，有关反事实替代方案的信息具有很强的动机吸引力-人们只是无法抗拒寻求它。
