The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(10)
Two decades of research on counterfactual thinking exposes an oddity: thoughts about the past that make us feel better are relatively rare, while thoughts that make us feel worse are exceedingly common. Are we all self-sabotaging masochists?
No—or at least not all of us. Instead, we are organisms programmed for survival. At Least counterfactuals preserve our feelings in the moment, but they rarely enhance our decisions or performance in the future. If Only counterfactuals degrade our feelings now, but—and this is key—they can improve our lives later.
Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
“I regret being embarrassed about being Mexican. I was able to pass (I’m light-skinned), so many people didn’t know I was Mexican until they met my family (who were dark). I have now come to embrace my race and heritage. I’m just ashamed I didn’t do it sooner.”
Female, 50, California
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“I regret cheating on my boyfriend of seven years instead of just breaking up with him. Then I regret doing it again after he agreed to stay together.”
Female, 29, Arizona
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“My deepest regret of my fifty-two years of life is having lived it fearfully. I have been afraid of failing and looking foolish, and as a result I did not do so many things that I wish I had done.”
Male, 52, South Africa
4.
Why Regret Makes Us Better
“There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen, 1992
Perhaps you’re familiar with the First Law of Holes: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” And perhaps you’ve ignored this law. We often compound bad choices by continuing to invest time, money, and effort in losing causes instead of stanching our losses and switching tactics. We increase funding in a hopeless project because we’ve spent so much already. We redouble efforts to salvage an irredeemable relationship because we’ve already devoted a few years to it. The psychological concept is known as “escalation of commitment to a failing course of action.” It’s one of the many cognitive biases that can pollute our decisions.
It’s also something that experiencing regret can fix. Gillian Ku, now of London Business School, found that getting people to think about a previous escalation of commitment, and then to regret it, decreased their likelihood of making the error again.[1] Inducing this unpleasant feeling of If Only improved their future behavior.
THE THREE BENEFITS OF REGRET
Reducing cognitive biases like escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is just one way that regret, by making us feel worse, can help us do better. A look at the research shows that regret, handled correctly, offers three broad benefits. It can sharpen our decision-making skills. It can elevate our performance on a range of tasks. And it can strengthen our sense of meaning and connectedness.
1. Regret can improve decisions.
To begin understanding regret’s ameliorative properties, imagine the following scenario.
During the pandemic of 2020–21, you hastily purchased a guitar, but you never got around to playing it. Now it’s taking up space in your apartment—and you could use a little cash. So, you decide to sell it.
As luck would have it, your neighbor Maria is in the market for a used guitar. She asks how much you want for your instrument.
Suppose you bought the guitar for $500. (It’s acoustic.) No way you can charge Maria that much for a used item. It would be great to get $300, but that seems steep. So, you suggest $225 with the plan to settle for $200.
When Maria hears your $225 price, she accepts instantly, then hands you your money.
Are you feeling regret?
Probably. Many people do, even more so in situations with stakes greater than the sale of a used guitar. When others accept our first offer without hesitation or pushback, we often kick ourselves for not asking for more.[2] However, acknowledging one’s regrets in such situations—inviting, rather than repelling, this aversive emotion—can improve our decisions in the future. For example, in 2002, Adam Galinsky, now at Columbia University, and three other social psychologists studied negotiators who’d had their first offer accepted. They asked these negotiators to rate how much better they could have done if only they’d made a higher offer. The more they regretted their decision, the more time they spent preparing for a subsequent negotiation.[3] A related study by Galinsky, University of California, Berkeley’s, Laura Kray, and Ohio University’s Keith Markman found that when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doing—for example, not extending a strong first offer—they made better decisions in later negotiations. What’s more, these regret-enhanced decisions spread the benefits widely. During their subsequent encounters, regretful negotiators expanded the size of the pie and secured themselves a larger slice. The very act of contemplating what they hadn’t done previously widened the possibilities of what they could do next and provided a script for future interactions.[4]