The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(46)

Which approach yielded the most survey responses?

It wasn’t even close. Within a week, only one-third of the students in the first group had completed the survey, but two-thirds of the students in the second group had done so.[2] The first instance was a good old-fashioned raffle. The second was what behavioral economists have come to call a “regret lottery.”

Regret lotteries are one way that anticipated regrets can alter our behavior. With an ordinary lottery, I must take affirmative steps to enter—in the Duke example, by filling out the questionnaire and returning it. If I don’t do that and someone who does ends up winning, I might be slightly bummed out (assuming I even find out). But with the odds slim and my emotional investment almost nonexistent, I’m unlikely to be devastated.

However, with a regret lottery, I evaluate my decision differently. If the organizers draw my name, and I haven’t completed the survey, I know I’ll kick myself. I can readily envision a future where I win the prize—but the gift card is snatched from my hands because of my own stupidity, laziness, or lack of effort. And if I anticipate that sinking feeling, I’ll proceed like two-thirds of those Blue Devils and complete the questionnaire.

Regret lotteries have been effective in changing behavior in many domains.[3] They exploit a cognitive quirk similar to “loss aversion.” In general, we find the pain of losing something greater than the pleasure of gaining the equivalent thing—so we go to extraordinary (and often irrational) lengths to avoid losses. “Losses loom larger than gains,” the dictum goes.[4] Similarly, when we anticipate our emotions, regret looms larger than rejoicing. In many situations, the prospective pain of regret outweighs the prospective gain of the alternative.

That can often work to our advantage. Anticipating our regrets slows our thinking. It applies our cerebral brakes, giving us time to gather additional information and to reflect before we decide what to do. Anticipated regret is particularly useful in overcoming regrets of inaction.

For instance, during the coronavirus pandemic, the largest predictor of young adults getting a COVID test was the regret they said they’d feel from not acting—if they avoided the test and then accidently passed the virus to someone else—according to a 2021 study by Russell Ravert of the University of Missouri, Linda Fu of Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, and Gregory Zimet of the Indiana University School of Medicine.[5] Another 2021 study, conducted by Katharina Wolff of the University of Bergen in Norway, found a similar effect with COVID vaccines. The anticipated inaction regret of not getting vaccinated, and thus endangering oneself and others, was a more powerful force in prompting people to get vaccinated than even factors like what one’s peers and family had chosen to do.[6]

When we envision how awful we might feel in the future if we don’t act appropriately now, that negative emotion—which we simulate rather than experience—can improve our behavior. A 2016 meta-analysis of eighty-one studies involving 45,618 participants found that “anticipated regret was associated with a broad array of health behaviors.”[7] For example, one well-regarded British study by Charles Abraham of the University of Sussex and Paschal Sheeran of the University of Sheffield showed that people prompted to agree with the simple statement, “If I did not exercise at least six times in the next two weeks, I would feel regret,” ended up exercising significantly more than people for whom regret was not on their minds.[8]

A pile of studies over the last fifteen years has demonstrated that anticipating regret can also prompt us to: eat more fruits and vegetables,[9] get an HPV vaccine,[10] sign up for a flu shot,[11] use condoms,[12] seek more information about our health,[13] look for early signs of cancer,[14] drive more carefully,[15] get a cervical screening,[16] quit smoking,[17] reduce consumption of processed foods,[18] and even recycle more.[19]

Anticipating regret offers a convenient tool for judgment. In situations where you’re unsure of your next move, ask yourself, “In the future, will I regret this decision if I don’t do X?” Answer the question. Apply that answer to your current situation. This approach underlies the (small but growing) popularity of “obituary parties”—in which people channel their inner Alfred Nobel, draft their own obits, and use the written pieces to inform their remaining years.[20] It is also the animating idea of “pre-mortems.” In this management technique, work teams mentally travel to the future before a project even begins to imagine a nightmare scenario where everything went wrong—say, the project came in over time or over budget or didn’t even get done. Then they use those insights to avoid the blunders before they occur.[21]

If one person embodies this approach to work and life—the apex predator of the anticipated regret food chain—that person is Jeff Bezos. He’s one of the richest people in the world, thanks to founding Amazon, one of the largest companies on the planet. He owns The Washington Post. He visits outer space. Yet in the domain of our most misunderstood emotion, he is best known for a concept that he calls the “Regret Minimization Framework.”

In the early 1990s, Bezos was working in banking when he conceived a company that would sell books via a newfangled technology called the World Wide Web. When Bezos told his boss that he intended to leave his high-paying job, the boss urged him to think about the move for a few days before committing.

A computer scientist by training, Bezos wanted a systematic way to analyze his decision—an algorithm of sorts for reaching a sound conclusion. And he finally came up with it. As he explained in a 2001 interview: