A tale of joy and regret

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…