Seven Ways to Harness the Power of Regret

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“Many people say they “regret nothing” or they “wouldn't do anything differently” if they could live over again. Although such statements are offered with sincerity, they can be difficult to accept at face value. Living a life with no mistakes and without any regrets is extraordinarily hard to accomplish. A lifetime of making choices brings with it the knowledge that at least some actions were ill-considered, some failures to act unwise. For most of us, it also brings with it the realization that some of these unfortunate outcomes could have been avoided. To live, it seems, is to accumulate at least some regrets.” - Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec (1995)

In this article I am going to discuss the science of regret. Specifically, I want to focus on regret as a cognitive skill that you can develop, as a tool that you can use to improve decision-making by regulating the intensity.

Learning how to balance regret is important. Too little and there is no incentive for you to make a different decision, but too much and you risk becoming preoccupied with reducing the intensity, allowing the regret to live inside your head.

​So what is regret, what purpose does it serve, and how can we regulate it?

The Science

• Regret is a painful emotion tied directly to the decisions you make. When you make what you believe was a bad decision you experience the pain of regret. Therefore, it is typically an emotion that we try to avoid.

• Using neuroimaging technology we can see regret as it occurs. When we make a bad decision there is activity in the orbital frontal cortex (OFC), an area of the brain associated with decision-making. This is different than other emotions, like disappointment for instance, where there can be pain but it is not associated with decision-making. 

 

• You are not born capable of regret. Instead, regret is an emotion that develops over time. First you develop the ability to experience regret. This occurs between 3-5 years old. This is when children begin to associate outcomes with the decisions that they made. But this is different than being able to anticipate regret, realizing that a decision today may lead to regret tomorrow. This does not develop until children are between 9-11 years old. 

 

• Regret can be due to action or inaction. An interesting finding is that when younger we tend to regret our actions, but this shifts as we age. As we get older we tend to regret our inactions, the opportunities that we think we missed or failed to seize. Why this happens is speculation, but one possibility is that when younger we perceive that there is still time available to act, to reverse course. Another possibility is that younger adults simply have not yet made as many decisions, have not accumulated as much experience, and therefore have not yet accumulated as many lost opportunities. 

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• The intensity of regret is not easy to study. It seems reasonable that when the perceived consequences of a bad decision are minimal the pain is less intense. The higher the perceived consequences, the more pain. One model of regret suggests that the intensity of pain depends on perceived opportunity and the ability to mitigate or address a regret. Pain will be the most intense in situations where a person believes that there will be no future opportunity and that even if an opportunity did arise there would be no way to change the outcome.

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Adapted from: Markman, K. D., & Beike, D. R. (2012). Regret, consistency, and choice: An opportunity x mitigation framework. 

The Purpose of Regret

Pain, whether physical or emotional, often times serves an evolutionary or adaptive purpose. Unlike some theories of the rational, cold, economic decision-maker (Homo economicus), research supports that we (Homo sapiens) are adaptive decision-makers. In this sense, a certain degree of pain is often times functional, if not for the individual at least for the group. When it comes to the emotion of regret studies show that it can help to modify future decisions.
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Seven Ways to Harness Regret

Given our current understanding, what are some ways that you might you use regret? Researchers often refer to ways we might better “regulate regret”, implying that the goal is not necessarily to eliminate the pain. In other words, like a thermometer, there is an intensity or range of regret that can be healthy or productive. It is therefore not a matter of avoiding the emotion, but rather harnessing it to help you make better decisions. That said, the strategies we use to regulate regret are usually focused on ways we can reduce the intensity, including:

• Avoid or delay the decision. Given the pain of regret is tied directly to the decisions you make, avoiding decisions will avoid the pain. However, this also eliminates the opportunity to learn.

 

• Transfer responsibility. This is similar too avoidance in that you make the decision, but then transfer the responsibility to someone else. If something bad happens, you avoid regret by claiming it wasn’t your decision or that you were just following orders. The Milgram shock experiments are a good example of this strategy. People tasked with deciding whether or not to administer a high voltage shock to a person pleading with them to stop the experiment, minimized regret by blaming researcher dressed in a lab coat to transfer responsibility.

 

• Seek justification. This is where you reduce regret by finding a reason why the decision was justified. This usually involves something like pointing to other people that made the same decision. If for example you invested in real estate or the stock market and then it collapsed, we justify the decision by pointing to others that also did not foresee the downturn.

 

• Use counterfactuals. This is the concept of finding a “silver lining” by imagining an even worse outcome. You reduce the pain by rationalizing that while your decision caused an accident that totaled your vehicle, at least no one was hurt.

 

• Avoid feedback. This is where you make the decision, but then you avoid learning the outcome. This reduces the pain, but it also reduces the opportunity to learn. For example, a firefighter might face some tough decisions at an accident scene. Later they don’t seek feedback from the hospital about what happened to the driver.

 

• Maintain options. Being able to switch to an alternative is another way to potentially reduce the intensity of regret. By keeping your options open you do not have to fully commit. On the other hand, fewer options helps to free up cognitive resources. This then allows you to focus on the decision and ways to improve or maximize outcomes.

 

• Increase decision quality. The final strategy is all about reducing the pain of regret by investing more time and resources to improve the quality of the decision. This is a great strategy when there is sufficient time and resources. It is not as useful when facing tough decisions made under time pressure and uncertain conditions. This takes us back to the first strategy of avoidance. It can be sometimes be difficult to tell if you are trying to increasing quality or if you are actually just avoiding or delaying the decision. This is the concept of ‘paralysis by analysis’. 

Final Thoughts

Taken together, you can use the strategies listed to try and balance the pain of regret with the ability to learn from your mistakes. To make better decisions, then, your aim should not be to mitigate or otherwise eliminate the pain. If you regret nothing, then in theory you will be setting yourself up to repeat the same decisions, to repeat the same mistakes. You will fail to learn. Instead, the goal in using these strategies is to harness regret, to use regret as a useful tool in learning how to make better decisions.

Select References

Connolly, T., & Zeelenberg, M. (2002). Regret in decision making. Current directions in psychological science, 11(6), 212-216.

Eryilmaz, H., Van De Ville, D., Schwartz, S., & Vuilleumier, P. (2014). Lasting impact of regret and gratification on resting brain activity and its relation to depressive traits. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(23), 7825-7835.

Markman, K. D., & Beike, D. R. (2012). Regret, consistency, and choice: An opportunity x mitigation framework. 

O'Connor, E., McCormack, T., & Feeney, A. (2014). Do children who experience regret make better decisions? A developmental study of the behavioral consequences of regret. Child Development, 85(5), 1995-2010.

Saez, I., Lin, J., Stolk, A., Chang, E., Parvizi, J., Schalk, G., ... & Hsu, M. (2018). Encoding of multiple reward-related computations in transient and sustained high-frequency activity in human OFC. Current Biology, 28(18), 2889-2899. 

Walster, G. W., & Walster, E. (1970). Choice between negative alternatives: Dissonance reduction or regret?. Psychological Reports, 26(3), 995-1005.

Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2007). A theory of regret regulation 1.0. Journal of Consumer psychology, 17(1), 3-18.