For all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’

- John Greenleaf Whittier

A recent article in Psychological Science proposed that after people make choices, they are so strongly pulled by the desire to know what would have happened had they made a different choice that they are willing to incur varying costs to find out.

This research was conducted by Dr. Lily FitzGibbon, at the University of Reading, Dr. Asuka Komiya at Hiroshima University, and Dr. Kou Murayama at Kochi University of Technology.

Everyday, people are faced with decisions that lead to mutually exclusive outcomes. Would it be faster to wait for the elevator, or take the stairs? Should I buy the no-name product at a discounted rate, or go for the more expensive name-brand alternative? Should I start writing my blogpost now, or keep browsing Reddit?

Once the decision is made, there is a certain allure to thinking about what might have happened had one gone with the other option – a phenomenon researchers have named ‘counterfactual curiosity’. Previous research on the topic has found that people will still seek information about alternative outcomes, even in situations when it will have no instrumental use for future decisions (e.g., checking the numbers on an unsubmitted lottery ticket).

Drs. FitzGibbon, Komiya, and Murayama wanted to find out how far people are willing to go to satisfy their counterfactual curiosity. In 5 experiments (and 1 replication study) using modified versions of the computer-based Balloon Analogue Risk Task (i.e., a task where participants are rewarded for guessing how many pumps it takes to fill a balloon without popping it), they assessed participants’ willingness to see alternative outcomes at no cost (other than potential resulting disappointment), at a monetary cost, at the cost of physical effort, and the cost of time.

Across the 5 initial experiments, the researchers recruited 150 participants to each complete 60 trials of different versions of their simulated balloon-pumping task. In every version of the task, the number of pumps it took to pop the balloon was randomly generated. Participants were rewarded for getting as close to that number as possible without going over and popping the balloon (in which case they would get no reward).

Where the tasks differed between experiments was in the cost participants had to pay to know what would have happened had they gone with a different number of pumps.

In the first experiment, there was no cost to finding out the balloon’s actual safe limit. In Experiment 2, participants had to give up some of the reward they accumulated to see it. Experiments 3 and 4 had participants exert physical effort in the form of rapid keypresses, and Experiment 5 incurred a time-delay of 5-seconds for every trial in which they wanted to find out the prior balloon’s limit.

Drs. FitzGibbon, Komiya, and Kochi also assessed participants’ emotional states when they found out if the trial was successful, and again after they were told the balloon’s actual limit.

Across the 5 experiments, the results indicated that people were willing to endure every different kind of cost they assessed to satisfy counterfactual curiosity. They were most likely to seek information when there was no cost (Experiment 1), and least likely to do so at the monetary cost of accumulated points (Experiment 2).

The researchers found that participants who sought to find out the balloon’s limit felt significantly worse after finding out than those who did not seek this information to begin with. Follow-up analyses determined that these negative feelings likely stemmed from the knowledge of the missed opportunity that came with finding out the balloon’s true limit.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that, on top of the overt costs disclosed in the experiment, there was an inherent economic cost to information seeking. The negative emotions people felt after learning the balloon’s true limit were associated with riskier decisions (and worse outcomes) on the next trial.

In a follow-up replication study, the researchers wanted to see if these findings held up when it was explicitly clear to participants that information seeking would have no instrumental benefit on subsequent trials. They recruited 361 more participants and ran them through a time-delay cost version of the experiment (similar to Experiment 5), but only for the last trial (where information could not be used to inform future trials). All major findings were replicated in the expected direction.

These findings demonstrate how strong the pull of counterfactual curiosity really is. In the current study, people were willing to pay costs of time, money, and effort to access information then ended up making them feel and perform worse – all driven by the need to find out what might have been!