...than to have never loved at all", is something we've all heard before. However, as a recent study in the journal of Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) shows, the popular saying might be quite detached from the true attitudes that humans display when faced with real-life choices and real-life potential for regret. According to the study, the regret of having done the wrong thing seems to be worse than the regret of not having done the right thing. Or, in terms of our popular saying: most people seem to pick the never-loved-at-all option. Indeed, there is a fair amount of literature out there that documents a general human tendency to differentiate between causes of regret (e.g. loving and regretting vs never having loved and regretting), and behavioral scientists have even coined a term for the implied human preference for regret that is due to passivity over regret that is caused by ones active behavior; namely omission bias.
Omission bias describes the common finding that erroneous choices by human subjects tend to be those of omission, that is failing to act, rather than those of acting.As the authors of the JDM article point out, omission bias is prevalent in many everyday situations, as when
"people are reticent to vaccinate children with a potentially lethal vaccine, even when this risk pales in comparison to the incidence of death caused by the primary disease. A staggering number of US households fail to rebalance their stock portfolios when it is optimal to do so. Many US workers under-participate in their retirement plans, despite the presence of employer-matching programs. Shoppers are often reluctant to make purchases when discounts are randomly offered in the market."
The study also mentions the economic consequences of deviating from the optimal strategy, by pointing out that
"those who followed the basic strategy won about $1.23 per hand for every dollar lost per hand. In contrast, deviators won about 80 cents per hand for every dollar per hand lost."
Despite the saliency of the effect in everyday life, non-experimental settings that would allow economists to properly calibrate the effect, remain difficult to find. This is why researchers from UCLA and Duke University needed to travel to Las Vegas in order to investigate the effect among gamblers at the Black Jack table.
While it might seem a little funny at first hearing, the choice of studying omission bias at the Black Jack table turns out to be a quite smart one, as Black Jack is one of the few gambling games with a well publicized basic strategy solution, and therefore allows the researchers to objectively classify mistakes as either mistakes of choosing a card when the basic strategy demanded not to do so, or mistakes of not choosing an additional card when the basic strategy prescribed doing so.
By analyzing 4,394 hands played in 1,393 rounds the study documents that errors due to omission account for 4 out of every 5 mistakes made. This 80% share that errors of omission have in the total number of errors is significantly above the 61.5% mark predicted by pure chance. Hence, the studies' authors find a strong support for the omission bias hypothesis in their data.
The finding is especially interesting in light of the fact that gamblers in Las Vegas are most likely not the most risk averse subject pool out there. In fact, the sample consists of people who explicitly come to Vegas in order to play; wherefore finding evidence for the omission bias here seems less expected.
In light of these findings, anybody trying to teach the basic strategy solution for Black Jack might want to start her lecture with the Helen Roland quote: "The follies which a man regrets most in his life, are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity."
BTW: I still intend to continue the "Science of Speed Dating" Series I started yesterday, but I just found out that the article I intended to discuss has already been discussed here by fellow PT blogger Satoshi Kanazawa. My two cents on the same study can be found here at my ingenious monkey blog.
Reference:
Carlin B. & Robinson D.T. (2009). Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: Evidence from blackjack tables Judgment and Decision Making, 4 (5), 385-396
