The other guy's dish seems better

Doesn’t it happen all the time? We take our time ordering a dish in a restaurant and just when our order is being served, we see the guy at the next table being served something that appears far more scrumptious and appetising than what we ordered. We nearly wish we could switch our order! Tongue in cheek, they say, even marriage is something similar! Now, have you wondered why that sense of regret invariably creeps in when you had every chance to choose whatever you wished in the first place?

Well, behavioural scientists have devoted some time investigating this phenomenon. They have found evidence that when we wish to choose something, we tend to reinforce our choice with
positive attributes associated with the choice, and when we wish to reject something, we focus more on the negatives.

For example, assume that you are considering renting a house. One of them is just 15 minutes’ drive from work, is centrally
located, has breezy balconies, with high rent, and a noisy neighbour. You get a periodic waft from food cooking at a restaurant close by.  The other one is about 40 minutes from work, a little on the edge of the city, in a nice neighbourhood, with a personal lawn and clean air, with a park next door, average rent, with a hum of highway traffic.

If willy-nilly you are inclined in favour of the first house, you are more likely to rationalise your choice by dwelling on its proximity to work, the breezy balconies and easy access to all segments of the city, while rejecting the second option on account of its greater distance from work, the remoteness of its location and the drone of the highway traffic, and so on.

Then one day you visit your friend, who happened to rent the second house. You find him relaxing on the lawn with a mug of beer in hand, and in a comely neighbourhood. What is worse, he’s
paying less for it all. Now suddenly these attributes, which were foregone in your choice of the first option, become an ‘opportunity loss’. By choosing what you did, you failed to choose the nice neighbourhood, the park, the lawn and the lower rent.

Now we know from an earlier piece in this column that losses typically loom larger than profits. This means that the loss of a
certain magnitude causes us much more distress than a gain of an equal magnitude gives us pleasure. Thus, the opportunity losses of our choices loom larger than the attributes favouring our choices. As a consequence, the regret of not making the other choice overpowers the pleasure of the choice that we made for ourselves, and we wish we had opted for the second house instead.

The same recurrent theme runs through all facets of our lives.
After considerable deliberation you decide to buy a car of certain make. You probably chose it for its low price, low maintenance,
extensive dealer network, and comfortable interiors. Having bought this car, you happen to meet that guy in the office who has bought this sporty model built for power and speed, with a long nose and most attractive interiors in real leather. Suddenly you
encounter attributes that you had to forgo in the choice that you made and this ‘loss’ immediately looms larger than the favourable attributes, and causes that tinge of regret.

Interestingly, the greater the alternative choices, the higher the level of regret in one’s original decision. This is because the greater the choice, the more the total number of attributes spread over all the choices. One also forgoes a lot more options. Think of it this way. In a McDonald’s, your level of regret is low because the choices available are few. On the other hand, in a typical Indian restaurant, where the choices on offer may be large, the regret is typically higher.

It is precisely this tendency of human beings that gives rise to a whole family of jokes. My favourite is: Anything that is delicious and yummy is either high in cholesterol, fattening, bad for the heart or married to someone else!