The seven-year-olds “performed very similarly to adults on the measures of the understanding of regret,” Guttentag and Ferrell write. Seventy-six percent of them understood that David would likely feel worse. But the five-year-olds showed little understanding of the concept. About three-fourths of them said the boys would feel the same.[4] It takes a few years for young brains to acquire the strength and muscularity to perform the mental trapeze act—swinging between past and present and between reality and imagination—that regret demands.[5] That’s why most children don’t begin to understand regret until age six.[6] But by age eight, they develop the ability even to anticipate regret.[7] And by adolescence, the thinking skills necessary to experience regret have fully emerged.[8] Regret is a marker of a healthy, maturing mind.
It is so fundamental to our development and so critical to proper functioning that, in adults, its absence can signal a grave problem. An important 2004 study makes that plain. A team of cognitive scientists organized a simple gambling game in which participants had to choose one of two computerized roulette-style wheels to spin. Depending on where the arrow landed on their chosen wheel, they would either win money or lose money. When participants spun a wheel and lost money, they felt bad. No surprise. But when they spun a wheel, lost money, and learned that if they’d chosen the other wheel, they’d have won money, they felt really bad. They experienced regret.
However, one group didn’t feel any worse when they discovered that a different choice would have produced a better outcome: people with lesions on a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. “[T]hey seem to experience no regret whatsoever,” neuroscientist Nathalie Camille and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science. “These patients fail to grasp this concept.”?[9] In other words, the inability to feel regret—in some sense, the apotheosis of what the “no regrets” philosophy encourages—wasn’t an advantage. It was a sign of brain damage.
The pattern is similar for other diseases of the brain, neuroscientists have found. Several studies present participants with a straightforward test like this:
Maria gets sick after visiting a restaurant she often visits. Ana gets sick after eating at a restaurant she’s never visited before. Who regrets their choice of restaurant more?
Most healthy people immediately know the answer is Ana. But people with Huntington’s disease, an inherited neurodegenerative disorder, don’t see the obviousness. They just guess; they land on the correct response no more often than chance.[10] It’s much the same among people suffering from Parkinson’s disease. They, too, fail to deduce the response you probably intuited instantly.[11] The effect is especially devastating for schizophrenia patients. Their illness scrambles the complex thinking I’ve been describing, creating a reasoning deficit that impairs the ability to comprehend or experience regret.[12] Such deficits are so pronounced in so many psychiatric and neurological diseases that physicians now use this impairment to identify deeper problems.[13] In short, people without regrets aren’t paragons of psychological health. They are often people who are seriously ill.
Our twin abilities to travel through time and to rewrite events power the regret process. But the process isn’t complete until we take two additional steps that distinguish regret from other negative emotions.
First, we compare. Return to the fifty-two-year-old woman from the survey, the one who wishes she’d followed her own educational desires rather than her father’s. Suppose she were suffering simply because her current situation is miserable. That alone doesn’t constitute regret. That’s sadness, melancholy, or despair. The emotion becomes regret only when she does the work of boarding the time machine, negating the past, and contrasting her grim actual present with what might have been. Comparison lives at regret’s core.
Second, we assess blame. Regret is your own fault, not someone else’s. One influential study found that roughly 95 percent of the regrets that people express involve situations they controlled rather than external circumstances.[14] Think again about our regretful Virginian. She compares her unsatisfying situation to an imagined alternative and comes up wanting. That step is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. What nudges her fully into the realm of regret is the reason that alternative doesn’t exist: her own decisions and actions. She’s the cause of her own suffering. That makes regret different—and far more distressing—than a negative emotion like disappointment. For instance, I might feel disappointed that my hometown basketball team, the Washington Wizards, didn’t win the NBA championship. But because I neither coach the team nor suit up for games, I’m not responsible and therefore can’t regret it. I just sulk and wait until next season. Or consider an example from Janet Landman, a former University of Michigan professor who has written widely about regret. One day, a child loses her third tooth. Before going to sleep, she puts the tooth under her pillow. When she awakens the next morning, she discovers that the Tooth Fairy has forgotten to replace the tooth with a prize. The child is disappointed. But it’s “the child’s parents [who] regret the lapse.”?[15]
Thus we have two abilities that separate humans from other animals, followed by two steps that separate regret from other negative emotions. That is the process that produces this uniquely painful and uniquely human emotion. Although it sounds complicated, the process occurs with little awareness and even less effort. It’s part of who we are. As two Dutch scholars, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters, put it, “People’s cognitive machinery is preprogrammed for regret.”?[16]
“AN ESSENTIAL COMPONENT OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE”
The result of this cognitive preprograming is that regret, despite all the exhortations to banish it, is remarkably common. In the American Regret Project, we asked our 4,489-person sample a question about their behavior that intentionally avoided using the r-word: How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently? The responses, shown in the chart below, are telling.
How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?
SOURCE: Pink, Daniel, et al., American Regret Project (2021).
Only 1 percent of our respondents said that they never engage in such behavior—and fewer than 17 percent do it rarely. Meanwhile, about 43 percent report doing it frequently or all the time. In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]