Exploring regret in decision-making: Lessons for social marketing

Regret is part of the human experience (Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2007). Indeed, most social marketing scholars, practitioners and participants having lived experience of regret, yet it remains largely ignored or underreported in the academic and grey literature. Regret is typically consigned to the decision-making literature, which talks of this notion as one that people largely ‘think through’ (cognitive), and to a lesser extent ‘feel through’ (affective), that may affect future decisions as regrets are known to linger (Sarwar et al., 2019). Despite the powerful nature of regret to shape decisions about future behaviour, much of the regret literature is limited to contexts such as online shopping (Barta et al., 2023).