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]
Feelings of regret spurred by setbacks might even be good for your career. A 2019 study by the Kellogg School of Management’s Yang Wang, Benjamin Jones, and Dashun Wang looked at a fifteen-year database of applications that junior scientists had submitted for a prestigious National Institutes of Health grant. The study authors selected more than a thousand applications that hovered near the rating threshold necessary to win the grant. About half the applicants just cleared the threshold. They got the grant, eked out a narrow win, and eluded regret. The other half fell just short. These applicants missed the grant, endured a narrow miss, and suffered regret. Then the researchers examined what happened to these scientists’ careers. People in the narrow-miss If Only group systematically outperformed those in the narrow-win At Least group in the long run. These Silver Emmas of science were subsequently cited much more often, and they were 21 percent more likely to produce a hit paper. The researchers concluded that it was the setback itself that supplied the fuel. The near miss likely prompted regret, which spurred reflection, which revised strategy, which improved performance.[15]
3. Regret can deepen meaning.
A few decades ago, I spent four years in Evanston, Illinois, where I earned an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. I’m generally happy with my college experience. I learned a ton and made several lifelong friends. But I’ve occasionally wondered what my life would have been like had I not been able to go to college or if I’d attended another university. And for some strange reason, those musings usually make me more, not less, satisfied with the experience, as if this small slice of time was somehow integral to the full story of my life.
Turns out, I’m not that special.
In 2010, a team of social scientists that included Kray, Galinsky, and Roese asked a collection of Northwestern undergraduates to reflect counterfactually about their choice of college and their choice of friends during college. When the students engaged in this sort of thinking, imagining they’d attended a different university or fallen in with a different set of pals, their reaction was like mine. The actual choice somehow felt more significant. “Counterfactual reflection endows both major life experiences and relationships with greater meaning,” the Northwestern study concluded.
And this effect isn’t limited to periods when we’re young and self-absorbed. In fact, other research has found that people who thought counterfactually about pivotal moments in their life experienced greater meaning than people who thought explicitly about the meaning of those events. The indirect paths of If Only and At Least offered a faster route to meaning than the direct path of pondering meaning itself.[16] Likewise, when people consider counterfactual alternatives to life events, they experience higher levels of religious feeling and a deeper sense of purpose than when they simply recount the facts of those events.[17] This way of thinking can even increase feelings of patriotism and commitment to one’s organization.[18]
While these studies examined the broader category of counterfactuals, regret in particular deepens our sense of meaning, and steers our lives toward its pursuit. For instance, conducting a “midlife review” focused on regrets can prompt us to revise our life goals and aim to live afresh.[19] Or take Abby Henderson, a twenty-nine-year-old behavioral health researcher, who contributed to the World Regret Survey:[*]
I regret not taking advantage of spending time with my grandparents as a child. I resented their presence in my home and their desire to connect with me, and now I’d do anything to get that time back.