After you make a decision, it is sometimes possible to seek information about how things would be if you had acted otherwise. We investigated the lure of this counterfactual information, namely, counterfactual curiosity. In a set of five experiments (total N = 150 adults), we used an adapted Balloon Analogue Risk Task with varying costs of information. At a cost, people were willing to seek information about how much they could have won, even though it had little utility and a negative emotional impact (i.e., it led to regret). We explored the downstream effects of seeking information on emotion, behavior adjustment, and ongoing performance, showing that it has little or even negative performance benefit. We also replicated the findings with a large-sample (N = 361 adults) preregistered experiment that excluded possible alternative explanations. This suggests that information about counterfactual alternatives has a strong motivational lure-people simply cannot help seeking it.

中文翻译：

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反事实好奇心的诱惑：人们要付出代价来体验遗憾

在您做出决定后，有时可以寻求有关如果您不采取其他行动会如何的信息。我们调查了这种反事实信息的诱惑，即反事实好奇心。在一组五个实验中（总共 N = 150 名成年人），我们使用了一个经过调整的气球模拟风险任务，其中包含不同的信息成本。付出一定的代价，人们愿意寻求有关他们本可以赢多少钱的信息，即使它几乎没有效用并且会产生负面的情绪影响（即，它会导致后悔）。我们探讨了寻求有关情绪、行为调整和持续绩效的信息的下游影响，表明它几乎没有甚至负面的绩效收益。我们还通过排除可能的替代解释的大样本（N = 361 名成人）预先注册的实验复制了这些发现。