The Dark Side of Opportunity: Regret, Disappointment, and the Cost of Prospects

Abstract

Abstract Having opportunities is something we all wish for. We think of opportunities as favorable combinations of circumstances, allowing us a chance to better our standing and progress toward our goals. But far less attention is usually paid to the dark side of opportunities, to the fact that sometimes we would have been better off if certain opportunities had never crossed our doorstep or come to our attention. A closer look reveals that opportunities are sometimes linked to negative emotions; when favorable opportunities are missed we often experience regret, and when the outcomes of opportunities fall short of our hopes and expectations we may experience disappointment. In this chapter we review two different lines of research investigating two phenomena related to the psychological cost of having opportunities: Inaction inertia and retroactive pessimism.

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