Anticipated regret—AR—can often make us better. But as your eventful day demonstrates, before you take this medicine, read the label.
Warning:
AR may cause decision paralysis, risk aversion, first instinct fallacies, and lower test scores.
As a universal drug, anticipated regret has a few dangerous side effects. But that’s not its only problem.
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Herbert Simon is one of the nearly one thousand people who’ve won the prize named for the regret-anticipating dynamite mogul we met earlier in this chapter. Simon was a masterful social scientist who taught at Carnegie Mellon University for fifty years and whose intellectual contributions spanned many fields, including political science, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. But perhaps his greatest legacy was pushing the field of economics to consider the human dimension in its analyses.
In the pre-Simon world, the dominant economic models assumed that when people made decisions, their preferences were stable and they had all the information they needed, so they always tried to maximize their outcomes. In every instance, and at every moment, we sought to buy at the lowest price possible, sell at the highest price, and relentlessly maximize our gains.
Simon persuaded the economics profession that this assumption, while accurate in some cases, wasn’t always correct. Our preferences sometimes changed. Depending on a variety of factors, we often lacked the proper information to make the ideal decision. Besides, pursuing the very best deal everywhere in our lives could be exhausting. In many situations, we simply didn’t care sufficiently to find the perfect option—the ideal roofer, the peerless fast-food burger—and were willing to settle for good enough.
Sometimes we maximize, Simon explained. Other times we “satisfice.”[33] If this were true—and analyses of people’s behavior showed that it is—the models had to change—and they did. For his work, in 1978 Simon won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences.
It took a while for psychologists to begin exploring the emotional consequences of Simon’s two decision-making approaches. But that moment arrived in 2002 when six social scientists, led by Barry Schwartz and Andrew Ward of Swarthmore College, developed a personality scale that measured an individual’s propensity to maximize or satisfice. Using a set of seventeen questions, they were able to identify which people pursued ideal standards （the maximizers） and which more often selected whatever met some threshold of acceptability （the satisficers.）
After administering their Maximization Scale to more than 1,700 participants, they connected the results to measures of these participants’ well-being. And the researchers uncovered a surprise. Most maximizers were miserable. The maximizers reported “significantly less life satisfaction, happiness, [and] optimism” and significantly more depression than the satisficers.[34]
When the scientists tried to explain the source of the unhappiness, they identified the main culprit: “maximizers’ increased sensitivity to regret—both experienced and anticipated.” Maximizers regretted everything at every stage. Before they made their choices. After they made their choices. While they made their choices. Whatever the situation, they always imagined the possibilities of something better if only they had acted differently.[35] But these upward counterfactuals didn’t uncork productive “feeling is for thinking” regret. They trapped people in ruminating “feeling is for feeling” regret. In their effort to maximize happiness on all things, they were pulverizing it on most things.
And herein lies a problem. The wobbly beam in Bezos’s Regret Minimization Framework is that constantly trying to anticipate and minimize our regrets can become a form of unhealthy maximizing. Applying this framework at all times and in all realms is a recipe for despair.
How, then, to reconcile these countervailing currents—to gain the benefits of anticipated regret without becoming caught in its downdraft?
The solution is to focus our aspirations.
OPTIMIZING REGRET
Our goal should not be to always minimize regret. Our goal should be to optimize it. By combining the science of anticipated regret with the new deep structure of regret, we can refine our mental model.
Call it the Regret Optimization Framework.
This revised framework is built on four principles:
In many circumstances, anticipating our regrets can lead to healthier behavior, smarter professional choices, and greater happiness.
Yet when we anticipate our regrets, we frequently overestimate them, buying emotional insurance we don’t need and thereby distorting our decisions.