What can a peculiar collective choice – and how the decision-makers have been feeling about it since they made it – tell us about the regrets (and joy) of decision making?
Many of our decisions are made “under uncertainty”. Often, we cannot be certain of the outcome, because there are certain elements we do not know, or that are so unpredictable we cannot even know them. We must therefore sometimes speculate, and indeed just hope for the best. This is one reason why we should be wary of judging decisions just by their outcome. Nonetheless, when a decision has led to the desired result, we feel happy, and when it has gone the other way, we tend to feel regret – the feeling of wishing we had made a different choice. We judge them, regardless.
And that is not so crazy. The positive or negative emotions at the outcomes of our decisions give us useful information. Even under uncertainty, making choices involves some degree of conscious reasoning that contributed to the outcome. Feeling regret over a bad outcome should not immediately make us put the blame on how we arrived at our decision, but it can trigger us to scrutinize our approach and look for potential flaws. Likewise, we can also try to disentangle the element of chance from the quality of our thinking if the result was what we wanted.
A regrettable trend
Most of us don’t systematically revisit past individual decisions. But some collective decisions attract the interest of polling organizations, which then track people’s mood, and their findings may help us understand better why we might feel regret (or joy) about past choices, and draw lessons to hone our decision-making skills. One such collective decision is the one the Britons made just over seven years ago, in the referendum to determine whether the United Kingdom (UK) should leave the European Union (EU), or remain a member state. A majority of the voters chose the former option, and the actual Brexittook place on 31 January 2020.
Since that referendum, the mood of the nation with respect to this rather significant event and its consequences has been frequently gauged by pollsters. Last month, YouGov published the results of its latest survey. When asked the question whether Britain was right or wrong to choose to leave the EU, 32% of the participants believe it was the right decision, while 57% answered it was the wrong choice – “‘Bregret’ at the highest level recorded to date”, as the press release phrased it. If a new referendum were held today, 61% of those expressing a preference would vote to rejoin the EU, while 39% would vote to stay out. By comparing this with the results of the actual referendum (52%/48% in favour of leaving), we can see the sentiment has swung by 9 percentage points, and that gives us a sense of the size of this “bregret”: the group of people that now wishes to be out of the EU has shrunk by 19%, so roughly one-fifth of them are regretting how they voted.
Naturally, the primary cause of regret over a decision is that its result ended up failing to meet our expectations. Perhaps the upsides did not quite materialize, or the downsides were bigger than anticipated. Especially under uncertainty, we make decisions that may be entirely rational, but within certain limits of access to information, and ability to identify and digest it. (Herbert Simon coined the phrase bounded rationality.) Whether it is a political decision such as EU membership, the purchase of a car, or getting married to our sweetheart, there are always facts about the choice we make that we could not reasonably have discovered in advance, or the consequences of which we could not realistically have foreseen. Few people audit the manufacturing process that produced the car they plan to buy, or hire a private detective to dig into their fiancé(e)’s past. And few people dissected the minutiae of what Brexit might entail.
Our actual experience of a decision with complex consequences will also depend on which particular aspects we are focusing on. It may have some positive beneficial outcomes, but if we have more eye for the drawbacks, the regret we feel about the decision may be disproportionate, provoked by a relatively small fraction of the overall outcome. So, perhaps some of the people who experience bregret may be influenced by the striking increased delays at the border controls, or the complications and cost of getting small parcels shipped to and from the EU, rather than by the country’s newly-regained freedom to strike trade agreements, which is not quite so visible. For a new car, it may be the awkward positioning of some of the controls, rather than the comfortable ride. And for a spouse? I am sure you can think of an example.
Our tendency to evaluate choices based on what is salient is illustrated by the striking upsurge of support for remaining out of the EU in early 2021. That was not coincidentally when the UK was sailing its own, somewhat buccaneering, course in planning and executing the COVID vaccination, no longer subject to the complicated and bureaucratic EU approach. The UK was months ahead of the EU, and that consequence of Brexit was clearly appreciated.
One specific reason the outcome of the decision might not meet our expectations is that they were imprecise and generic to start with. People who voted to leave the EU to “take back control” might now discover that this slogan didn’t actually foreshadow anything concrete, and find that whatever they imagined this new-found independence to mean has not been realized. Similarly, we might have visualized untold, but vague, driving enjoyment in our new car, but find that, as most of our driving is in heavy commuter traffic, reality doesn’t really live up to that dream. We might also learn that anticipating to “live happily ever after” lacked more than a little specificity, making it hard to be positive about the outcome of getting married.
Regret is, understandably, largest if our expectations remain unmet because we failed to take into account something we could have known, but didn’t spot at the time. Perhaps voters were so enthused by the prospect of regaining sovereignty, that they did not consider the restrictions on travelling to and residing in the EU. In the same way, we might have been so preoccupied with the good looks of the car or of our prospective life partner that we paid no attention to the mediocre reliability record of the brand, or that we dismissed the stories suggesting potential character flaws in our future spouse as sour grapes from jilted exes. Here, we might exhibit a raft of inappropriately applied biases, from WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) and wishful thinking, to motivated reasoning and optimism bias. We notice only what appeals to us, and hope our dreams will become true, we reason away as insignificant facts that don’t fit our preferred narrative, and are convinced that everything will work out for the best.
Experiencing regret is therefore much more likely if we decide impulsively, without adequately considering the longer-term consequences. We are then also exposed to the big yellow taxi fallacy * after the Joni Mitchell song in which she sings, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
A bit of joy, but with a twist
Let us not lose sight of the fact that four out of five Leave voters show no signs of regret, though. They must be joyful that what they wished for came to pass. However, for some, all may not be what it seems: they might not be entirely happy with all the consequences, but who have resolved the cognitive dissonance of regret by rationalizing their choice and doubling down. If we make a choice that we, for whatever reason, strongly identify with, or even if having to admit that we made the wrong call feels too unpleasant, we may end up sticking with it, regardless of the consequences. That can be just as much the case for the vote on EU membership, as for our choice of car or spouse. We bury our regret under a layer of conviction – for others and for ourselves.
Most of those who stand by their original choice, however, will be genuinely happy with the outcome. But will that joy be pure and unadulterated? Given the current sentiment, reasonable questions can be asked about the legitimacy of the situation. If – as many Leave voters argued after the referendum – the will of the people has primacy, then those who voted to leave the EU must be torn with the present situation. The outcome is what they wished, but it also goes against a deeply held principle. Should they safeguard their joy by disregarding the fact that the will of the people is being violated? Or should they join the ranks of those who campaign to rejoin the EU because that is what the will of the people is, even if it goes against their preferences?
Sigh. Decision making is not easy.
Koenfucius 