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]
This finding echoes what researchers have been discovering for forty years. In 1984, social scientist Susan Shimanoff recorded the everyday conversations of a collection of undergraduates and of married couples. She analyzed the recordings and transcripts and identified the words that expressed or described emotions. Then she compiled a list of the emotions, positive and negative, that people mentioned most frequently. Feelings like happiness, excitement, anger, surprise, and jealousy all cracked the top twenty. But the most common negative emotion—and the second most common emotion of any kind—was regret. The only emotion mentioned more often than regret was love.[18]
In 2008, social psychologists Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal Roese examined the prevalence of negative emotions in people’s lives. They presented participants with a list of nine such emotions: anger, anxiety, boredom, disappointment, fear, guilt, jealousy, regret, and sadness. Then they asked people a series of questions about the role these feelings played in their lives. The emotion that participants said they experienced the most was regret. The emotion they said they valued the most was also regret.[19]