Emotional Amplification Effect

Implications for the Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking

Kahneman and Miller (1986) termed the stronger emotional response to an event with unusual or easily imagined alternatives the emotional amplification effect. Here, a mutable action is one that people can readily imagine changing in hindsight. Findings from the present research show that the amplified affect generated by a mutable negative action–outcome sequence itself has important psychological sequelae. First, the amplified affect biases people’s memories for the commonness of the sequence; second, it induces anticipatory regret in people when they contemplate taking an action that might initiate the sequence.

One question pertaining to anticipatory regret that we have not yet addressed concerns its prevalence. In particular, do people anticipate regret whenever they engage in an abnormal action (for example, deviate from routine)? The answer clearly seems to be No. Not all ill-fated actions that evoke regret will, in prospect, have elicited anticipatory regret. People might experience considerable regret when they have an accident after deciding to take a different route home from work (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b), but they are unlikely when contemplating this decision to have thought to themselves, “If I take a different route home and have an accident, I will never forgive myself.” Whether the magnitude of the anticipatory regret evoked by a prospective action–outcome sequence matches the regret the sequence actually produces depends on the salience of the negative outcome. On the one hand, people do not typically worry about having an accident on the way home from work, and thus do not typically experience anticipatory regret over the decision to take a different route home, however much regret that decision may subsequently evoke in them. On the other hand, if they did have such worries, they would likely experience anticipatory regret and would likely be hesitant to take the different route. We propose as a general principle that people’s differential reluctance to engage in mutable as compared to immutable acts increases as a function of their fear of a negative outcome, with that fear being a joint product of people’s subjective judgment of the probability of the outcome’s occurrence and their evaluation of the outcome. The more painful the negative outcome, the more regret people anticipate and the more reluctant they are to engage in an abnormal course of action. This principle predicts that the hesitancy to deviate from the status quo increases with the perceived stakes. Thus, the hesitancy to change multiple-choice answers should increase with the importance of one’s performance on the test.

Anticipatory regret also increases with individuals’ subjective probability estimates. Consider people’s willingness to switch commercial air flights at the last minute. Findings from previous research have shown that a survivor of a plane crash is expected to experience more regret if he or she engages in the highly mutable action of switching flights shortly before takeoff (Miller et al., 1990). Should one assume from this finding that people would be reluctant to switch flights at the last minute? We propose that the reluctance will depend on their fear of crashing. People with an intense fear of flying, who presumably think incessantly of crashing, can be expected to be very reluctant to switch flights, and possibly even to switch seats. However, people comfortable with flying might be no more hesitant to switch flights at the last minute than to take a different route home from work. In many cases, the differential hesitancy to engage in abnormal actions reflects both the subjective probability the decision maker attaches to the occurrence of negative fate and his or her perceptions of its severity. The greater willingness of professors to switch classes than of matadors to switch bulls would seem to reflect just such a confluence of subjective probabilities and subjective utilities.