The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(28)

Haidt and his colleagues call this idea “moral foundations theory.”?[4] Drawing on evolutionary biology, cultural psychology, and several other fields, they show that beliefs about morality stand on five pillars:

         Care/harm: Children are more vulnerable than the offspring of other animals, so humans devote considerable time and effort to protecting them. As a result, evolution has instilled in us the ethic of care. Those who nurture and defend the vulnerable are kind; those who hurt them are cruel.





         Fairness/cheating: Our success as a species has always hinged on cooperation, including exchanges that evolutionary scientists call “reciprocal altruism.” That means we value those whom we can trust and disdain those who breach our trust.



     Loyalty/disloyalty: Our survival depends not only on our individual actions, but also on the cohesiveness of our group. That’s why being true to your team, sect, or nation is respected—and forsaking your tribe is usually reviled.



     Authority/subversion: Among primates, hierarchies nourish members and protect them from aggressors. Those who undermine the hierarchy can place everyone in the group at risk. When this evolutionary impulse extends to human morality, traits like deference and obedience toward those at the top become virtues.[5]



     Purity/desecration: Our ancestors had to contend with all manner of pathogens—from Mycobacterium tuberculosis to Mycobacterium leprae—so their descendants developed the capacity to avoid them along with what’s known as a “behavioral immune system” to guard against a broader set of impurities such as violations of chastity. In the moral realm, write one set of scholars, “purity concerns uniquely predict (beyond other foundations and demographics such as political ideology) culture-war attitudes about gay marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and pornography.”?[6]





Moral foundations theory doesn’t say that care is more important than purity or that authority is more important than fairness or that you should follow one set of foundations instead of another. It simply catalogs how humans assess the morality of behavior. The theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. But its descriptive power is considerable. Not only did it reshape my understanding of both human reasoning and modern politics; it also offered an elegant way to interpret our moral regrets.





THE FIVE REGRETTED SINS


Deceit. Infidelity. Theft. Betrayal. Sacrilege. Sometimes the moral regrets people submitted to the surveys read like the production notes for a Ten Commandments training video. But the wide variety of regrets people reported sharpens into focus when viewed through the five moral frames I just described on the previous page. Two of the frames encompassed most of the regrets, but two of the other three were also well represented.





1. Harm


In the 1920s, when sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd began a long-term project to discover the soul of middle-class America for their classic book Middletown, the place where they chose to embed was Muncie, Indiana.[7] It was—and, in some ways, still is—the quintessential American small town. And it’s where Steve Robinson had what is often the quintessential American childhood experience: bullying.

Steve moved to the Muncie area in eighth grade. He was a small kid, introverted and socially awkward. But he compensated for these perceived deficits by becoming a menace. He taunted and teased his classmates. He picked fights. At age sixteen, he punched a fellow student and broke his two front teeth.

Now, at age forty-three, these gratuitous aggressions are Steve’s deepest regrets.

People of all political persuasions agree: hurting someone who’s not provoking us is wrong. No surprise, then, that in both the American Regret Project and the World Regret Survey, people reported more harm-related moral regrets than any other kind. And the most common harm was bullying. Even decades later, hundreds of respondents deeply regretted mistreating their peers.

For example, a fifty-two-year-old New York man admitted:

    I bullied a new kid in the seventh grade. He was from Vietnam and hardly spoke any English. Horrible!



A forty-three-year-old woman in Tennessee said:

    I made fun of a kid in middle school, dubbing him “Ziggy” for having a short, stubby body and spiky blond hair. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he realized that the name would stick. It was cruel, putting me in the “power” position after I had endured years of bullying myself, but I regretted it immediately and have never done anything like it again.



Steve told me that in the moments preceding the bullying, “I knew I shouldn’t be doing this.” Yet he did. He enjoyed the attention. He relished the feeling of power. But he knew better. In fact, he’d occasionally been bullied himself, both at home and at school. “Having been on both sides of it, and knowing what it felt like, and then still having done it to someone else, is what I find most regretful,” he told me.

Unlike boldness regrets, moral regrets are more likely to involve actions than inactions. But for some people, including Kim Carrington, simply being a bystander to bullying was enough to trigger regret.

When she was eight years old, Kim took a daily school bus from her small town on Minnesota’s Iron Range to a larger town where her elementary school was located. Each day, the bus would pick up another girl, who lived in a farmhouse in a more remote area. And each day, when the girl boarded the bus, the other children would hold their noses as if she smelled, pelt her with rude names, and refuse to give her a place to sit.