Regrets

xkcd, in its awesomeness, has managed to poignantly illustrate a deep and meaningful concept with none other than descriptive statistics and a bar chart. Jay Livingston, in his awesomeness, has managed to connect the deeper meaning of the comic to Stanley Milgram's experiements.

In Milgram's class assignment, people were supposed to approach strangers on a subway and ask for their seat. Many students, upon being faced with the task, literally were nauseated. And that was just asking for a seat!

I wondered what would happen if xkcd's little statistical test were run by gender. Who regrets kissing/not kissing more? I could formulate hypotheses in which a female would be more likely to regret kissing rather than not. For example, my friends and I witnessed an instance at ASA in which two women quite likely regretted dancing and flirting with two men (the men didn't take it kindly when the women decided NOT to go home with them). And since it is typically considered the man's job to make a move, we might also expect less statements from women overall, regardless of whether their regret centered on action or inaction.

Without further ado, here's my findings:


I think Jay has it on the nose that people are generally more likely to regret inaction than action. But it's interesting that men are more likely to regret either (both?) when it comes to kissing. However, the overall pattern of greater regret over inaction remained. I am guessing that if we ran further tests on this data, we'd find that the inaction/action regret differential is more substantial for men than for women, indicating that there may actually be something to my first hypothesis after all.

Further research is needed in order to determine whether this gender difference is consistent across behaviors. Are men more likely to be regretful in general? Or just when it comes to making a move?

And how can we help these poor, regretful souls?