Regret

The Experience of Regret

Regret stems from a comparison between outcomes of chosen and nonchosen alternatives in which the latter outperform the former. It is a painful emotion that reflects on our own causal role in the current, [Page 640]suboptimal situation. The emotion regret is accompanied by feelings that one should have known better and having a sinking feeling, by thoughts about the mistake one has made and the opportunities lost, by tendencies to kick oneself and to correct one's mistake, by desires to undo the event and get a second chance, and by actually doing this if given the opportunity. It is a cognitively based emotion that motivates one to think about how the current negative event came about and how one could change it or how one could prevent its future occurrence.

Action and Inaction Regret

We may regret sins of omission and sins of commission. Early regret research indicated that people tend to regret their actions (commissions) more than their inactions (omissions). Later research showed that time plays a crucial role here. In the short run, people tend to feel more regret over their actions (the stupid things they did or bought), but in the long run, they tend to feel more regret over their inactions (the school they never finished, the career or romance never pursued). This temporal pattern to regret is due to a number of factors that decrease the regret for action over time (e.g., we take more reparative action and engage in more psychological repair work for action regrets than for inaction regrets) and to factors that increase the regret for inaction over time (e.g., over time we may forget why we did not act on opportunities, making the inaction inexplicable).

Another factor determining the intensity of regret is the justifiability of the decision. People feel most regret over decisions that are difficult to justify. Decisions that are based on solid reasons produce less regret than decisions that are not well thought through. This justifiability may also explain when actions are more regretted than inactions and when the reverse is true.

Regret, Decision Making and Counterfactual Thinking

Regret is unique in its relation to decision making. One only experiences regret over a bad outcome when at some point in time one could have prevented the outcome from happening. Other emotions can also be the result of decisions; for example, one may be disappointed with a decision outcome or happy about the process by which one made a choice. But these emotions can also be experienced in nonchoice situations. For example, one can be disappointed in the weather and happy with a birthday present, but one cannot regret these instances (unless, of course, if the disappointing present was suggested by oneself).

The relation between regret and decision making is also apparent in regret's connection to counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thoughts are thoughts about what might have been. Note that not all counterfactual thoughts produce regret but only those that change a bad outcome into a good one by changing a prior choice or decision. Thus, when it rains on the way home from work and I get wet, I feel regret when I generate a counterfactual thought in which I brought an umbrella but not when I generate a counterfactual in which it would be a beautiful day. In the latter case, counterfactual thoughts about better weather that could have been would result in disappointment but not in regret (I could not change the weather, so there is nothing to regret).

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