The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(36)

So, what do we all ultimately want and need?

The deep structure of regret, summarized in the table below, provides an answer.





THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF REGRET





We seek a measure of stability—a reasonably sturdy foundation of material, physical, and mental well-being.

We hope to use some of our limited time to explore and grow—by pursuing novelty and being bold.

We aspire to do the right thing—to be, and to be seen as, good people who honor our moral commitments.

We yearn to connect with others—to forge friendships and family relationships bonded by love.

A solid foundation. A little boldness. Basic morality. Meaningful connections. The negative emotion of regret reveals the positive path for living.





COULDA AND SHOULDA


Each time you look in the mirror, you see one person. But if you squint a little harder, you might see three selves.

That is the idea animating a theory of motivation that Tory Higgins, a Columbia University social psychologist, first proposed in 1987. Higgins argued that we all have an “actual self,” an “ideal self,” and an “ought self.”

Our actual self is the bundle of attributes that we currently possess. Our ideal self is the self we believe we could be—our hopes, wishes, and dreams. And our ought self is the self we believe we should be—our duties, commitments, and responsibilities.[1]

What fuels our behavior and directs which goals we pursue, Higgins argued, are discrepancies between these three selves. For instance, if my ideal self is someone who’s healthy and physically fit but my actual self is lethargic and overweight, that gap might motivate me to start exercising. If my ought self believes in caring for elderly relatives but my actual self hasn’t visited Grandma in six months, I might leave the office early and to Grandmother’s house I will go. However, when we don’t make these efforts, when a discrepancy persists between who we are and who we could or should be, unpleasant feelings flood the gap.

In 2018, Shai Davidai, of the New School for Social Research, and the ubiquitous Thomas Gilovich enlisted Higgins’s theory to analyze regret. Expanding on Gilovich’s earlier research showing that, over time, people regret inactions more than actions, they conducted six studies that reached a single conclusion: people regret their failures to live up to their ideal selves more than their failures to live up to their ought selves. Regrets of “coulda” outnumbered regrets of “shoulda” by about three to one.

The likely reason is the contrasting emotional consequences of these two flavors of regret. Discrepancies between our actual self and our ideal self leave us dejected. But discrepancies between our actual self and our ought self make us agitated—and therefore more likely to act. We feel a greater sense of urgency about ought-related regrets, so we’re more likely to begin repair work—by undoing past behavior, apologizing to those we’ve wronged, or learning from our mistakes.[2] “Couldas” bug us longer than “shouldas,” because we end up fixing many of the “shouldas.”[*]

This analysis offers another window into the deep structure of regret. Failures to become our ideal selves are failures to pursue opportunities. Failures to become our ought selves are failures to fulfill obligations. All four of the core regrets involve opportunity, obligation, or both.

For example, boldness regrets—If only I’d taken that risk—are entirely about opportunities we didn’t seize.[3] Foundation regrets—If only I’d done the work—are also largely about opportunities (for education, health, financial well-being) that we didn’t pursue. Connection regrets—If only I’d reached out—are a mix. They involve opportunities for friendship we didn’t follow through on, as well as obligations to family members and others that we neglected. Moral regrets—If only I’d done the right thing—are about obligations we didn’t meet.

The result is that opportunity and obligation sit at the center of regret, but opportunity has the more prominent seat. This also helps explain why we’re more likely to regret what we didn’t do than what we did. As Neal Roese and Amy Summerville have written, “Regrets of inaction last longer than regrets of action in part because they reflect greater perceived opportunity.”?[4]

The importance of opportunity became clearer when I reexamined the data I collected in the American Regret Project, the quantitative portion of my research. The size and breadth of this survey allowed me to investigate differences between subgroups. Do women’s regrets differ from men’s? Do Black Americans hold different regrets than White Americans? Do life regrets depend on whether you’re rich or poor?

The short answer is that group differences were not massive. The longer and more intriguing answer is that the differences that did emerge reinforced the centrality of opportunity as a driver of regret.

Take, for example, the education level of respondents. People with college degrees were more likely to have career regrets than people without college degrees. At first that might seem surprising. Having a college degree generally affords people a wider set of professional options. But that could be precisely why college graduates have more career regrets. Their lives presented more opportunities—and therefore a larger universe of foregone opportunities.

Income presented a similar pattern. Regrets about finance, not surprisingly, correlated tightly with household income—the lower the household income, the more likely someone was to have a finance-related regret. But regrets about careers ran in the reverse direction. That is, the higher the income, the more likely it was that someone had a career regret. Again, more opportunities could beget more regrets about unrealized opportunities.