Routines and Regret: An Examination of Behavioral Norms and Emotional Responses

Overview

In this study, we investigated the relationship between routine behaviors and feelings of regret, focusing on two thought experiments: a hitchhiking scenario and a car accident scenario. We replicated and expanded upon previous research findings. Our results indicate that individuals tend to experience higher levels of regret in situations that deviate from their routine or normal behavior. This pattern was evident in both scenarios, where participants expressed more regret and perceived misfortune when actions led to negative outcomes in less common,exceptional circumstances. Such findings highlight the significance of routine in our decision-making processes and the emotional consequences of deviating from it. This research not only replicates previous studies but also extends our comprehension of how societal norms and personal routines influence our feelings of regret, providing valuable perspectives for both psychological theory and practical applications in managing emotional well-being.

File Structure

The repo is structured as:

• data/raw_data contains the raw data as obtained from the original work conducted by Kutscher, L., & Feldman, G.
• data/analysis_data contains the clean data refined through our labeling process.
• other contains relevant literature, details about LLM chat interactions, and sketches.
• paper contains the files used to generate the paper, including the Quarto document and reference bibliography file, as well as the PDF of the paper.
• scripts contains the R scripts used to simulate, download, clean, test data and generate graphs.

Statement on LLM usage

Aspects of the code were written with the help of the auto-complete tool, Codriver. The abstract and introduction were written with the help of Chatgpt-4 and the entire chat history is available in inputs/llms/usage.txt.