A possible limitation concerning the interpretation of Studies 1 and 2
is that our dependent measures may not reflect peoples' true sense of
satisfaction (or feelings of regret), but rather a vague intuition of how
they would have reacted. For example, research on affective forecasting
has demonstrated that people are sometimes erroneous in predicting
affective states (e.g., Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). In particular, would-be
avengers tend to falsely believe that their vengeful reaction would
make them feel happy (Carlsmith et al., 2008). In contrast, more recent
research suggests that avengers are indeed able to make pretty accurate
predictions about how revenge will affect their sense of satisfaction and
justice achieved (Funk et al., 2014; Study 1). Thus, empirical evidence
on affective forecasting in vengeful situations is rather mixed. Nevertheless, in Study 3, participants were given the opportunity to actually take
revenge and report their true experience of justice-related satisfaction
and regret.