Union College
Department of Psychology
807 Union St.
Schenectady, NY 12308
Tel.: (518) 388-8055
fesself@union.edu
Research Interests
Broadly speaking, my research centers on the consequences of people thinking about the past. This general interest has led me to investigate more specific questions related to what psychologists call hindsight bias and the emotion regret.
Hindsight Bias
Once people learn about the loss of their favored politician, the victory of their beloved football team, or a plunge in the stocks they own, the outcome often seems predictable, even inevitable. This tendency to see events as more predictable after they occurred (i.e., in hindsight) than was originally believed before their occurrence is known as the hindsight bias.My research, however, has shown that under some circumstances hindsight bias can reverse such that people can become “hyperconfident” about an event outcome in the future and perceive it as certain. Importantly, these people can become more confident that the outcome will occur than people who know the outcome but are asked to rate its predictability as if they did not (Fessel & Roese, in press; Roese, Fessel et al., 2006).
In subsequent work I investigated how the perceived likelihood of an event outcome, in fore- and hindsight, varies over time. Take for instance a presidential election. It seems intuitive that the perceived likelihood of a candidate’s victory will differ a year, a month, or a day before the election. My research is the first to provide a fine-tuned conceptual understanding of the extent to which people’s judgments about such event sequences are accurate and biased (Fessel, Epstude, & Roese, 2009).
Regret
In a second line of research I investigate regret, which is an emotion that often emerges when people realize that their actions could have resulted in a better outcome than was actually obtained (Fessel & Roese, 2007). My collaborators and I gathered the first representative sample of the US population to examine the types of regrets that people have and to investigate their relationship with other mental health outcomes (Roese, Epstude, Fessel, et al., 2009).Apparent from this national survey was that romance is one of the life domains that most often leads to regret, and that regret in this domain is particularly agonizing. Despite its frequency and severity, research on regret regarding romantic relationships has been conspicuously absent. In one of my current projects, I try to fill this gap by investigating the downstream consequences that regret about one’s romantic relationship has for later relationship satisfaction and maintenance (Fessel, Au, & Roese, in preparation).
Motivation and Construal Level Theory
Finally, another current research interest of mine includes how the temporal distance and construal level of a goal – that is, the extent to which the goal is interpreted abstractly or concretely – influence the level of aspiration that people desire to obtain in goal pursuit (Fessel, 2011).Representative Publications:
Fessel, F., & Roese, N. J. (in press). Hindsight Bias, visual aids, and legal decision-making: Timing is everything. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
Fessel, F. (2011). Increasing level of aspiration by matching construal level and temporal distance. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2, 103-111.
Fessel, F., Epstude, K., & Roese, N. J. (2009). Hindsight bias redefined: It’s about time. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110, 56-64.
Roese, N. J., Epstude, K., Fessel, F., Morrison, M., Smallman, R., Summerville, A., Galinsky, A., & Segerstrom, S. (2009). Repetitive regret, depression, and anxiety: Findings from a nationally representative survey. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 28, 671-688.
Kruger, J., Windschitl, P. D., Burrus, J., Fessel, F., & Chambers, J. R. (2008). On the rational side of egocentrism in social comparisons. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 220-232.
Fessel, F., & Roese, N. J. (2007). Counterfactual thinking. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 196-198). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Roese, N. J., Summerville, A., & Fessel, F. (2007). Regret and behavior: Comment on Zeelenberg and Pieters. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17, 25-28.
*Roese, N. J., Fessel, F., Summerville, A., Kruger, J., & Dilich, M. A. (2006). The propensity effect: When foresight trumps hindsight. Psychological Science, 17, 305-310.
*Editor’s Choice (2006). Science, 311, 1675. (The Editor’s Choice section of Science magazine summarizes highlights of the recent literature from various fields).
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Last Revised By: Florian Fessel: February 7, 2011
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