Research Stories

by Carrie Barnett

Every March, about 30 million Americans print out NCAA basketball tournament brackets. They spend days agonizing over their predictions. Many wager hard-earned money that they've made the right choices. Then they settle in for the three-week bonanza that is March Madness.

Stephen Nowlis says it's an experience they probably don't enjoy.

Nowlis is a professor of marketing at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business. His latest research reveals just how much we humans can be affected by emotional uncertainty—uncertainty that arises when we make predictions about certain events.

Nowlis and ASU marketing colleague Naomi Mandel found that when people make predictions about certain events, their enjoyment in watching those events decreases. Their study results will be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The "prediction" business is booming, Nowlis says. So it would seem natural to assume that prediction-based marketing schemes would be a good thing for business. The ASU study results support that assumption.

Mandel and Nowlis designed a series of different experiments. All were constructed to give the researchers a peek into how viewers would react, on an emotional level, to situations in which they were asked to make a prediction—or not—about the outcome of various scenarios.

In one experiment, the researchers rounded up 91 undergraduates to watch a clip from the game show, "The Weakest Link." Some students were asked to predict the winner after watching just the first segment of the show. The researchers found the "predictor" participants "demonstrated a significantly lower level of enjoyment" than those who simply watched the show.

But why?

Simple, says Nowlis. Nobody likes to be wrong.

The researchers dubbed this emotion "anticipated regret." And they say that anticipated regret may actually be a more powerful downer than actual regret. In other words, the anxiety caused by the concern that one might lose may be more powerful than the sting of actually losing.

This story was excerpted from the Knowledge @ W. P. Carey web site. To see the full article or other stories from ASU's W. P. Carey School of Business, go to: http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu