But the Medvec-Gilovich-Madey study has been replicated. Even its replications have been replicated. For example, David Matsumoto of San Francisco State University assembled about 21,000 photographs from the men’s and women’s judo competitions at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, a massive photo set that represented 84 athletes from 35 countries. Regardless of the national origin or ethnicity of the athletes, the difference in facial expression among the medalists was striking. During the podium ceremonies, the gold medalists were almost all smiling widely (what’s called a “Duchenne smile”). So, too, were most of the bronze medalists. The silver medalists? Not so much. They smiled only one-fourth as much as their counterparts.[4]
In 2020, William Hedgcock of the University of Minnesota and Andrea Luangrath and Raelyn Webster of the University of Iowa went further. They collected photos of 413 athletes from 142 sports and 67 countries over five separate Olympic Games. But instead of asking other people to evaluate the athletes’ facial expressions, as in previous studies, they used Emotient, computer software that encodes facial expressions automatically. (The program allowed researchers to scrutinize more expressions more quickly, free of any potential bias from human examiners.) Once again, the results held. Gold medalists smiled the most. But bronze medalists smiled much more than silver medalists. “[T]hose who were objectively better off nonetheless felt worse,” the paper’s authors noted.[5]
I’ve watched that 2016 Rio road race several times. In the minutes after it ended, it’s easy to see the solace of At Least and the sting of If Only. Borghini, the bronze medalist, looked jubilant. She hopped off her bike, loped toward a group of friends and family, and embraced each one. “Elisa Borghini is absolutely delighted with a medal at the Olympic Games!” the announcers cried.
Johansson, meanwhile, huddled quietly with her husband, her affect flat, as the announcers offered their own upward counterfactual. “Another fifty or one hundred meters, and she might have got out over the top,” they speculated. It was a moment of “mixed emotions” for her, they explained. “A silver medalist once again.” Indeed, Johansson had won the silver in the same event during the 2008 Olympics. (She didn’t compete in the 2012 games because of an injury.) She’d finished second in several other races, too, earning her a nickname in the cycling world that she never embraced—Silver Emma. “She’s ‘Silver Emma,’?” Johansson’s mother told Swedish television after the finish. “I think she’s happy, but she wanted gold.”?[6]
If only.
THE PARADOX OF PAIN AND THE PAIN OF PARADOX
At Leasts make us feel better. “At least I ended up with a medal—unlike that American rider who blew it in the final seconds of the race and never reached the podium.” “I didn’t get that promotion, but at least I wasn’t fired.” At Leasts deliver comfort and consolation.
If Onlys, by contrast, make us feel worse. “If only I’d begun that final chase two seconds earlier, I’d have won a gold medal.” “If only I’d taken a few more stretch assignments, I’d have gotten that promotion.” If Onlys deliver discomfort and distress.
It would seem, therefore, that we humans would favor the first category—that we’d choose the warmth of At Least over the chill of If Only. After all, we’re built to seek pleasure and to avoid pain—to prefer chocolate cupcakes to caterpillar smoothies and sex with our partner to an audit with the tax man.
But the truth is different. You’re much more likely to have a Silver Emma moment than a Bronze Borghini one. When researchers have tracked people’s thoughts by asking them to keep daily diaries or by pinging them randomly to ask what’s on their mind, they’ve discovered that If Onlys outnumber At Leasts in people’s lives—often by a wide margin.[7] One study found that 80 percent of the counterfactuals people generate are If Onlys. Other research puts the figure even higher.[8] The main exception are situations in which we’ve eluded calamity. For instance, one study of tourists who witnessed a deadly tsunami but managed to escape found that, several months later, they generated ten At Least comparisons for every If Only. These people didn’t feel aggrieved for being exposed to a natural disaster; they felt lucky for surviving it.[9] In a sense, that’s also the experience of the bronze medalists, who avoided the far less devastating catastrophe of being denied an Olympic medal. But in our day-to-day experiences, those quotidian moments that form most of human existence, we’re much more likely to conjure If Onlys when we ponder what might have been. That’s how our brains and minds work.
Two decades of research on counterfactual thinking exposes an oddity: thoughts about the past that make us feel better are relatively rare, while thoughts that make us feel worse are exceedingly common. Are we all self-sabotaging masochists?
No—or at least not all of us. Instead, we are organisms programmed for survival. At Least counterfactuals preserve our feelings in the moment, but they rarely enhance our decisions or performance in the future. If Only counterfactuals degrade our feelings now, but—and this is key—they can improve our lives later.
Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual—the ultimate If Only. The source of its power, scientists are discovering, is that it muddles the conventional pain-pleasure calculus.[10] Its very purpose is to make us feel worse—because by making us feel worse today, regret helps us do better tomorrow.
“I regret being embarrassed about being Mexican. I was able to pass (I’m light-skinned), so many people didn’t know I was Mexican until they met my family (who were dark). I have now come to embrace my race and heritage. I’m just ashamed I didn’t do it sooner.”
Female, 50, California
//
“I regret cheating on my boyfriend of seven years instead of just breaking up with him. Then I regret doing it again after he agreed to stay together.”
Female, 29, Arizona
//
“My deepest regret of my fifty-two years of life is having lived it fearfully. I have been afraid of failing and looking foolish, and as a result I did not do so many things that I wish I had done.”
Male, 52, South Africa
4.
Why Regret Makes Us Better
“There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen, 1992
Perhaps you’re familiar with the First Law of Holes: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” And perhaps you’ve ignored this law. We often compound bad choices by continuing to invest time, money, and effort in losing causes instead of stanching our losses and switching tactics. We increase funding in a hopeless project because we’ve spent so much already. We redouble efforts to salvage an irredeemable relationship because we’ve already devoted a few years to it. The psychological concept is known as “escalation of commitment to a failing course of action.” It’s one of the many cognitive biases that can pollute our decisions.
It’s also something that experiencing regret can fix. Gillian Ku, now of London Business School, found that getting people to think about a previous escalation of commitment, and then to regret it, decreased their likelihood of making the error again.[1] Inducing this unpleasant feeling of If Only improved their future behavior.
THE THREE BENEFITS OF REGRET