Influence Of Attribution Of Responsibility To "Regret Avoidance Behavior" In Repeated Decision Making

Regret, as a kind of emotion associated with decision making, has got more and more attention of theresearchers. In the previous researchs on regret, some focus on the regret behavior, namely, for the same negativeresults, different behavior cause different degree of regret; and some focus on the influence of regrets to behavior,that is, regret is a kind of negative emotion, people always take some actions to avoid it when making decisions.There are some correlations between these two parts. If people expect they will get less regret after a kind ofbehavior, then, they will tend to make this kind of behavior to reduce or avoid the regret.Decision justification theory(DJT), proposed by Connolly and Zeelenberg, believe that the sense ofresponsibility is a key factor that affect regret, for the same negative result, why different behavior caused differentdegree of regret? According to DJT, this is because the sense of responsibility is different, in that way, whetherregret is also affected people’s behavior through the sense of responsibility? This research discussed theregret avoidance behavior in repeated decision making from the aspect of responsibility attribution.Experiment1tested the influence of two kinds of regret in DJT to the regret avoidance behavior(feedbackbehavior, decision-making time) by adapted decision task, and investigated whether there was any difference onthe sense of responsibility between subjects in the two groups, the result is basically consistent with previousstudy(Reb&Connolly,2009), and the significant difference is found on the sense of responsibility in the twogroups.Experiment2explored the regret avoidance behavior from the aspect of responsibility attribution,examined whether there was any difference on their regret avoidance behavior and task performance by activatingtwo kinds of responsibility attribution. The results showed that, relative to participants who activated externalattribution, participants who activated internal attribution were more inclined to seek feedback, and decision timeis longer, task performance is better.Experiment3investigated how the trait of responsibility attribution, namely the inside-outside locals ofcontrol, infuluce the regret avoidance behavior. The result showed the significant negative impact of the local ofcontrol to regret avoidance behavior, that is, the more external control the subject is, the more possibility to refusefeedback, and the decision-making time is shorter.In a word, the result of this study wides the reserch of the relationship between regret and behavior, and canguide for repested decision making in real life.