In a prospective study of 576 families whose children had their tonsils removed for recurrent throat infections, 91% of parents were satisfied with the benefit one year later, and febrile sore-throat episodes fell from a mean of 6.7 in the year before surgery to 1.5 in the year after (Wolfensberger et al., 2000). Direct measurement with the validated Decision Regret Scale tells the same story from the other direction: among 102 families, median decisional regret after tonsillectomy was 0 (Carr et al., 2016), with the regret that did exist concentrated among parents who had entered the decision conflicted. For the typical family that proceeds, action regret is low — roughly the 9% who were not satisfied with the result.
The waiting side carries more documented hindsight regret. In the same 576-family cohort, 28% of parents regretted not having arranged the surgery earlier — a wish, in retrospect, that they had stopped waiting sooner. This is the inaction-regret proxy, and it must be read with care: it is measured among parents who ultimately operated, not among families who declined surgery and kept the tonsils, because no survey directly asks the watchful-waiting group whether they regret that choice. The AHRQ-supported systematic review (Morad et al., 2017) explains the structural reason the asymmetry runs this way: surgery produces a real but modest reduction in throat infections in the first year that does not persist, while most children improve with age regardless. The regretted cost of waiting is therefore the year or two of continued illness, not a permanent loss.
The pattern fits Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal asymmetry: the parents who acted overwhelmingly judge the outcome positively, while a larger share of those who delayed wish they had moved sooner. The honest limits are real. Both proxy rates come from a single surgical cohort, the action figure is dissatisfaction rather than regret, and tonsillectomy carries genuine surgical risk — post-operative bleeding and anaesthetic complications — that satisfaction surveys understate. Current guidelines (AAO-HNS, 2019) deliberately frame the benefit as “modest” against the natural history of resolution. What the data establish is a direction, not a precise gap: among families facing recurrent throat infection, the decision to wait generates more retrospective regret than the decision to operate, even though for most children the difference fades within a couple of years.