Anticipating regret can sometimes steer us away from the best decision and toward the decision that most shields us from regret—as you’ll discover again when you return to the office.
After leaving the electronics store, you buy a $1 ticket for tomorrow evening’s $80 million Powerball drawing. As it happens, I’ve also bought a Powerball ticket. And I decide to make you a deal. I offer to trade you my ticket for yours—and give you $3 for it.
Would you accept?
Of course, you should. And, of course, you won’t.
Both of our tickets have an equal chance of winning. If you make the exchange, your odds of winning Powerball remain identical and extremely remote. But you’ll now have three more dollars than before. It’s a no-brainer!
But in laboratory experiments, more than half of people resist such offers—because it’s so easy to imagine the regret they’ll feel if they traded away the eventual winner.[26] Only when experimenters place the lottery ticket in a sealed envelope—so people can’t see their original numbers and won’t know if they held the winning ticket—are people more willing to make this type of exchange.[27]
In the Powerball case and many others, minimizing regret is not the same as minimizing risk. And if we don’t anticipate properly, we end up making the regret-minimizing choice rather than the risk-minimizing choice. Sometimes that means no decision at all. Regret aversion can often lead to decision aversion, many studies have shown.[28] If we focus too much on what we’ll regret, we can freeze and decide not to decide. Likewise, in studies of negotiation, focusing too much on anticipated regret actually stalled progress. It made negotiators risk averse and less likely to strike a deal.[29]
Your workday is nearing an end, but your obligations are not. Because you’re an ambitious sort, you’re also studying for a real estate license along with holding down your current job. Tonight is your first exam—eighty multiple-choice questions.
You gulp a cup of coffee and enter the exam room. You’ve got two hours to complete the exam. It’s going well. You’re proceeding steadily through the questions, marking your answers on the bubble form, when a thought occurs to you.
“On question twenty-three, I chose B. But now I think that C might be the right answer.”
Do you return to that question, erase your original response, and pencil in a new one? Or do you stick with your first instinct?
At every level of schooling and professional training, the advice that experts offer is consistent. In surveys, most college professors suggest that you stay with your initial instinct, because changing answers typically hurts student grades. The academic advisers at Penn State University concur: “[Y]our first hunch is usually correct. Don’t change an answer unless you are very sure of the change.” The Princeton Review, whose business is preparing students for every variety of standardized test, cautions: “Most times you want to go with your gut, rather than over thinking your answers. Many students just end up changing the right answer to the wrong one!”[30]
The conventional wisdom is plain: stick with your first instinct and don’t change the answer.
The conventional wisdom is also wrong. Nearly every study conducted on the topic has shown that when students change answers on tests, they are significantly more likely to change from a wrong answer to a right answer （sweet!） than they are to switch from a right answer to a wrong one （d’oh!）。 Students who change their answers usually improve their scores.[31]
So, why does this wrongheaded advice endure?
Anticipated regret distorts our judgment.
In 2005, Justin Kruger, a social psychologist now at New York University, along with Derrick Wirtz, now at the University of British Columbia, and Dale Miller of Stanford University examined the erasures on more than 1,500 psychology exams taken by students at the University of Illinois, where Kruger and Wirtz were then teaching. Consistent with previous research, switches from the wrong answer to the right answer were twice as common as switches from right to wrong.
But when researchers asked the students which they would anticipate regretting more—“switching when I should have stuck” or “sticking when I should have switched”—the responses were revealing. Seventy-four percent of those students anticipated more regret from switching answers. Twenty-six percent said it wouldn’t matter. And exactly none of the students anticipated greater regret from sticking with their initial answer.
Kruger, Wirtz, and Miller call this the “first instinct fallacy,” and it grows from anticipated regret gone awry. “Getting a problem wrong as a result of going against one’s first instinct is more memorable than getting a problem wrong because of failing to go against one’s first instinct,” they write. “The regret produced by switching an answer when one should have stuck with one’s original answer is enough to make the misfortune of having missed the question seem almost tragic.”[32] Haunted by the prospective specter of If Only, we err. You err, too. Because you didn’t switch your answer, you just missed passing the test and must take it again. If only you knew about this research earlier.