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Disappointment Makes You More Trusting: An Interview with Luis Martinez

From the October 2015 Issue

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Dave Wheeler Dave Wheeler

The research: Luis F. Martinez of the Nova School of Business and Economics and his research partner, Marcel Zeelenberg of Tilburg University, asked people to play a classic economic game in which two partners transfer money back and forth. The amount exchanged indicates their level of trust. Before playing, some subjects were primed to feel regret; others were primed to feel disappointment. A third group wasn’t primed and served as a control. Across three experiments, regretful subjects transferred less money and therefore showed less trust than the other groups. Disappointed subjects sent the largest sums, displaying significantly more trust.

The challenge: Does being let down really cause you to have a more positive attitude toward others? Is disappointment the key to collaboration?

Professor Martinez, defend your research.

Martinez: Going in, we weren’t sure what would happen. We knew negative emotions could sometimes have positive social implications. However, we saw a pretty clear effect: Disappointment increased the trust of the person handing over the money, and this in turn led the person getting the money to be more trusting. Regret did the opposite. Trust went down on both sides.

HBR: How did you measure trust? 

We used a cooperative game involving two players. The first player starts with some amount of money, say 20 euros, and decides how much of it to send to a randomly chosen partner. Then the second player decides how much of that money to send back to the first player. In the first move, people who trust their partners to reciprocate will send higher amounts; in the response, more money signals a greater desire to be seen as trustworthy.

What did you do to make participants feel regret and disappointment? 

In the first two tests, we asked people to read sentences containing words associated with regret (like “mistake,” “self-blame,” and “poor choice”) or disappointment (“unexpected,” “powerless,” and “bad luck”). This is a standard approach. It’s called implicit emotional induction because participants don’t realize what emotion the sentences are evoking. But it’s less precise than other methods, so in the third experiment we opted for an autobiographical-recall approach, in which we asked people to write about a recent time they’d felt regret or disappointment. They knew, explicitly, that they were experiencing the assigned emotion. This procedure is widely used in emotional research, and it’s probably one of the most effective ways to prime people.

Hold on—aren’t regret and disappointment pretty comparable? 

Well, the emotions are in some ways similar. They both involve counterfactual thinking: When you feel either one, you’re comparing what is with what might have been. Historically, researchers have lumped them together, because a lot of research has evaluated emotions solely by valence—basically, whether an emotion is positive or negative. Regret and disappointment were among the emotional states combined under the label “negatively valenced emotion.” They weren’t examined much individually.

However, there are real distinctions between the two. We own regret in a way that we don’t own disappointment. Regret is about our bad decisions—things we believe we’ve done wrong. We feel personally at fault for the bad outcome. That makes us more cautious, and we’ll try to avoid mistakes in the future. In contrast, we often don’t have direct control over disappointing situations. We may not feel at fault. Feeling powerless to affect the bad result is part of the emotion. If your favorite soccer team loses a big match, your expectations and hopes aren’t met. You know it isn’t really your fault, but it still upsets you. That’s disappointment.

But why do these distinctions make such a big difference in trust? 

We have a pretty good idea about the mechanisms behind regret. As I said, previous research has shown that it typically makes people take fewer risks. In our study it appears that regretful people anticipated feeling more regret, and to avoid that, they became more cautious, which in turn meant that trust got shut out.

Our theory for disappointment isn’t as robust; we’re still examining it. There may be a moral component involved. Another possibility is that with disappointment, people try to compensate for their powerlessness: “Because I couldn’t do anything to improve that thing, I’ll focus on doing this thing better instead.”

If I want my boss to trust me with an important project, should I get my coworkers to disappoint her first? 

Maybe—but probably not. Reality is much more complex than a game with limited variables. But these emotions clearly do have real-world implications. For instance, Professor Zeelenberg did a study comparing regret and disappointment in customers of internet service providers. His team found that people who regretted their choice of provider usually changed to another one, whereas disappointed participants did not change even though they knew they had bad service. They engaged in negative word of mouth. They kept complaining and complaining, but they did not switch providers.

Disappointing your customers is a sound customer-retention strategy? 

Well, in a way. If a company knows that it’s going to make some people unhappy, it should aim for disappointed consumers over regretful ones. Sure, disappointed consumers might complain—and that might be pretty negative in terms of, say, online reputation—but they won’t change their consumption behavior. Effectively, the company gets a second chance. And this is just one example; these two emotions might have different implications for managerial issues and even for negotiations.

We’ve run several articles in the past about the value of happiness and positivity in motivation. It sounds as if you’re saying those aren’t as important as some people think. 

It’s a question of circumstance. This study supports what we already know: that many negative emotions, such as shame, guilt, and envy, have some positive component. For example, displaying anger can be good in negotiations. And we cannot show clearly that feeling good always improves our decisions. Now, I’m not saying we all should feel negative and unhappy. We should absolutely try to induce positive emotions in people, because feeling better has many implications aside from productivity! But maybe it’s OK if we aren’t happy all the time.

Where will you take this research next? 

I think that negative emotions are richer in content than positive ones, so that’s where I’ll continue to focus. One thing I want to do is make distinctions among the effects of negative emotions across economic games that represent very different situations and interactions. For instance, when we tested regret and disappointment with an ultimatum game, which is quite individualistic and doesn’t involve reciprocation, we found that regret led to more pro-social behavior, which is the opposite of what happened in the trust experiments.

I’m not disappointed by this interview. I don’t regret doing it. 

I trust your readers won’t regret it, either.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2015 issue (pp.36–37) of Harvard Business Review.

Sam Haas was an editorial intern at HBR.