Research, As The Effects Of Regret

Regret is common in humans'everyday life. According to the statistics of Shimanoff(1984), regret is the second common mood in human'experiences. When individual realize or imagine if taken other behavior previous, the result would be better, regret mood will be produced(Zeelenberg,1996). Previous studies of regret indicate that regret could be change by influenced by action or non-action responsibility, effort and individual factors. In these studies, the influence to regret of action and non-action Was particularly concerned.Kahneman et al (1982) believe that the regret caused by action is more intense than the regret caused by non-action. They testified this notion through the "stock story" experiment. And they named this phenomenon "action effect". Many researchers had testified this effect. They found that action effect could be influenced by many factors, such as time, Short-term regret support action effect. But long-term regret is just the opposite (Gilovich,1995,1998). Another example is task situation. The study of Junqi Shi (2004) indicate that regret caused by non-action is more intense than regret caused by action in symbolic situation. But under the Interest situation, the fact is just the opposite.Responsibility is an important factor that could influence regret. However, previous studies seldom consider the influence of responsibility to action effect. And, in the studies of Gilovich(1995,1998), the concept of action is difference from the concept that Kahneman(1982) used in the "stock story" experiment. In this study, I explored the influence of responsibility to regret in action effect under an unified concept, and explored the differences between long-term regret and short-term regret under difference responsibility.In the first study, I explored through experiment that in the tasks of different responsibility, between the regret caused by action and the regret caused by non-action, which is more intense. In the second study, I explored through questionnaire that the differences between long-term regret and short-term regret. The result of these studies indicate that: 1) In the task of high responsibility, the regret caused by non-action is more intense than regret caused by action. But in the task of low responsibility, there was no significant difference between the regret caused by action and regret caused by non-action.2) The study of difference between long-term regret and short-term regret indicate that:in the survey of long-term regret, the number of regret caused by non-action is larger than the number of regret caused by action, and the number of regret in task that needs effort is larger than the number of regret in task that does not need effort. In the survey of short-term regret, the number of regret in task that does not need effort is larger than the number of regret in task that needs effort, and there is not significant difference between the number of regret caused by action and regret caused by non-action.These useful conclusions provides suggestions for the future research.