Our cognitive apparatus is designed, at least in part, to sustain us in the long term rather than balm us in the near term. We need the ability to regret our poor decisions—to feel bad about them—precisely so we can improve those decisions in the future.
2. Regret can boost performance.
Clairvoyants smash egg pools.
That’s an anagram for Psychologists love anagrams. And it’s true. Anagrams are a staple of psychological research. Usher participants into a room. Give them some words or phrases to rearrange into other words or phrases. Then manipulate their mood, their mindset, their environment, or any other variable to see how it affects their performance.
For example, in one experiment, Keith Markman （from one of the negotiation studies） and two colleagues gave participants ten anagrams to solve. After supposedly “grading” the results, they told participants that they’d found only half of the available words. Then they poked people with a little regret. “Close your eyes and think about your actual performance on the anagrams compared to how you might have performed better,” they told the participants. “Take a minute and vividly evaluate your performance in comparison to how you might have performed better.” Their heads now swimming with If Onlys, these puzzle-solvers felt worse—especially compared to another group that had been asked to make At Least comparisons. But on the next round, the regretful group solved more puzzles and stuck with the task longer than anyone else in the experiment.[10] This is one of the central findings on regret: it can deepen persistence, which almost always elevates performance. One of the pioneers in studying counterfactual thinking, Neal Roese, whose research appears throughout these pages and the Notes, used anagrams in one of his earliest and most influential papers. He, too, found that inducing regret—poking participants with If Onlys—enabled people to solve more anagrams and to solve them faster.[11]
Or leave the laboratory and enter the casino. One intriguing experiment, also led by Markman, asked people to play blackjack against a computer. The experimenters told half the participants that after the first round, they’d depart. They told the other half that after the first round, they’d play a few more hands. People who knew they’d be playing again generated many more If Onlys than people who were one-and-done. They were more likely to regret pursuing a flawed card-playing strategy or taking too much or too little risk. The first group, meanwhile, avoided negativity. They mostly generated At Leasts （“At least I didn’t lose all my money!”）。 But the card players in the second group willingly initiated the unpleasant process of experiencing regret “because they needed preparative information to help them perform better,” the researchers wrote. “Participants who did not expect to play again needed no such information and, instead, wanted only to feel good about their current performance.”？[12]
Even thinking about other people’s regrets may confer a performance boost. Several studies have introduced a character named Jane, who’s attending a concert of her favorite rock band. Jane begins the concert in her ticketed seat, but then moves to another seat to be closer to the stage. A bit later, the band announces that promoters will soon randomly select a seat and give a free trip to Hawaii to whoever is sitting in it. Sometimes participants in this experiment hear that the seat that Jane recently switched to is the one that wins the free trip. Rejoice! Other times participants hear that the seat that Jane left is the one that wins. Regret! People who heard Jane’s If Only saga, and then took a section of the Law School Admission Test, scored 10 percent higher than a control group. They also did a better job of solving complex puzzles like the Duncker candle problem, a famous experimental test of creative thinking.[13] Getting people to think counterfactually, to experience even vicarious regret, seems to “crack open the door to possibilities,” Galinsky （from the negotiation studies） and Gordon Moskowitz explain. It infused people’s subsequent deliberations with more strength, speed, and creativity.
To be sure, regret doesn’t always elevate performance. Lingering on a regret for too long, or replaying the failure over and over in your head, can have the opposite effect. Selecting the wrong target for your regret—say, that you wore a red baseball cap at the blackjack table rather than that you took another card when you were holding a ten and a king—offers no improvement. And sometimes the initial pain can momentarily throw us. But most times, reflecting even a bit on how we might benefit from a regret boosts our subsequent showing.[14]