Anticipated Or Experienced Regret Cause The Inaction Inertia Effect?

The inaction inertia effect was termed by Tykocinski et al.That is when people bypassing an initial attractive action opportunity ,they tend to continue forgoing subsequent opportunities. Go through the"inaction inertia"articles, there are some factors affect the inaction inertia effect, including difference in attractiveness, difference in responsibility, distance of time and space, gain and loss, opportunity source, social comparison, tight coupling and people's traits. Most scholars focus on the causes of the inaction inertia effect. There are two main theoretical explanations. One is the devaluation explanation, that is, when people miss the first more attractive opportunity, the second opportunity was confronted, they tend to devaluate the first opportunity and it is not worth investing the efforts or money, so the likelihood of the second opportunity will be decreased. The other is the regret avoidance explanation ,including avoidance of anticipate regret ,and escaping from experienced regret. The former said, people will expect that"if the take the second opportunity, then they will regret", so to avoid the negative emotion, they will refuse the second one. The later said, when miss the first opportunity, people have experienced the regret ,when the second one appears, which will triggers the bad experience, to avoid this ,they tend to refuse the subsequent one. However,scholars haven't reach the consentience. So, this research trying to check if the inaction inertia effect occurs or not in Chinese culture situation,and also to find experienced regret or anticipated regret cause this effect.Go through the"inaction inertia"literature,we find that experienced regret and anticipated regret are confused with each other. Thus, we use the classical shopping scenario which Tykocinski used to conduct four experiments. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Inaction inertia effect also happens in Chinese culture situation, the outcome is according to the former research. We find that difference in attractiveness is the key factor to the phenomenon. That is, when the first opportunity is much more attractive than the subsequent one, people tender to inaction, although the second has it's positive value.(2) Responsibility is one factor to influence the regret emotion. So we manipulate the responsibility, high or low, to see if the inaction inertia occurs. The conclusions suggest that if you have the high responsibility, you tender to inaction more. The regression outcome shows anticipated action regret and anticipated inaction regret,not the experienced regret cause the inaction effect. (3) Experiment 3, we conclude that when multiple options, the impact of the missed opportunity as a point of reference decreases, and that when multiple options are offered, decreasing the inaction inertia effect.(4) Experiment 4, showed that temporal segregation of the current from the missed opportunity decreased inaction inertia effects. The regression outcome shows anticipated action regret and anticipated inaction regret,not the experienced regret cause the inaction effect.