That can often work to our advantage. Anticipating our regrets slows our thinking. It applies our cerebral brakes, giving us time to gather additional information and to reflect before we decide what to do. Anticipated regret is particularly useful in overcoming regrets of inaction.
For instance, during the coronavirus pandemic, the largest predictor of young adults getting a COVID test was the regret they said they’d feel from not acting—if they avoided the test and then accidently passed the virus to someone else—according to a 2021 study by Russell Ravert of the University of Missouri, Linda Fu of Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, and Gregory Zimet of the Indiana University School of Medicine.[5] Another 2021 study, conducted by Katharina Wolff of the University of Bergen in Norway, found a similar effect with COVID vaccines. The anticipated inaction regret of not getting vaccinated, and thus endangering oneself and others, was a more powerful force in prompting people to get vaccinated than even factors like what one’s peers and family had chosen to do.[6]
When we envision how awful we might feel in the future if we don’t act appropriately now, that negative emotion—which we simulate rather than experience—can improve our behavior. A 2016 meta-analysis of eighty-one studies involving 45,618 participants found that “anticipated regret was associated with a broad array of health behaviors.”[7] For example, one well-regarded British study by Charles Abraham of the University of Sussex and Paschal Sheeran of the University of Sheffield showed that people prompted to agree with the simple statement, “If I did not exercise at least six times in the next two weeks, I would feel regret,” ended up exercising significantly more than people for whom regret was not on their minds.[8]
A pile of studies over the last fifteen years has demonstrated that anticipating regret can also prompt us to: eat more fruits and vegetables,[9] get an HPV vaccine,[10] sign up for a flu shot,[11] use condoms,[12] seek more information about our health,[13] look for early signs of cancer,[14] drive more carefully,[15] get a cervical screening,[16] quit smoking,[17] reduce consumption of processed foods,[18] and even recycle more.[19]
Anticipating regret offers a convenient tool for judgment. In situations where you’re unsure of your next move, ask yourself, “In the future, will I regret this decision if I don’t do X?” Answer the question. Apply that answer to your current situation. This approach underlies the (small but growing) popularity of “obituary parties”—in which people channel their inner Alfred Nobel, draft their own obits, and use the written pieces to inform their remaining years.[20] It is also the animating idea of “pre-mortems.” In this management technique, work teams mentally travel to the future before a project even begins to imagine a nightmare scenario where everything went wrong—say, the project came in over time or over budget or didn’t even get done. Then they use those insights to avoid the blunders before they occur.[21]
If one person embodies this approach to work and life—the apex predator of the anticipated regret food chain—that person is Jeff Bezos. He’s one of the richest people in the world, thanks to founding Amazon, one of the largest companies on the planet. He owns The Washington Post. He visits outer space. Yet in the domain of our most misunderstood emotion, he is best known for a concept that he calls the “Regret Minimization Framework.”
In the early 1990s, Bezos was working in banking when he conceived a company that would sell books via a newfangled technology called the World Wide Web. When Bezos told his boss that he intended to leave his high-paying job, the boss urged him to think about the move for a few days before committing.
A computer scientist by training, Bezos wanted a systematic way to analyze his decision—an algorithm of sorts for reaching a sound conclusion. And he finally came up with it. As he explained in a 2001 interview:
I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.[22]
Bezos anticipated a boldness regret, then made avoiding it in the future the impetus for his behavior in the present. The Regret Minimization Framework was a wise move for him, and it’s a useful mental model for the rest of us. Anticipating our regrets, we’ve seen, can improve our health, help us become billionaires, and earn the affection of survey-distributing college librarians. It is a powerful medicine.
But it should come with a warning label.
THE DOWNSIDE OF ANTICIPATION
To understand how anticipated regrets can go sideways, let me invite you to ride a subway, buy a microwave oven, exchange a Powerball ticket, and take a standardized test.
Imagine it’s the morning rush hour and you’re racing to catch a subway train to work. On your way to the station, your shoe comes untied because in your earlier rush you tied it so hastily. You find an empty patch of sidewalk, stop for a minute, retie your shoe, and move on. As you arrive on the subway platform, you see your train pull away. Drat! If only you hadn’t stopped to fix your laces, you would have made your train.
How much regret would you anticipate experiencing from missing the train by one minute?
And a related question: How much regret would you expect to experience if instead you missed the train by five minutes?
According to Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University, who led a group of researchers who conducted experiments about this very issue at a subway station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, most people forecast that they’ll suffer much greater regret from the one-minute miss than the five-minute miss. Yet in reality, the amount of regret people actually endure is about the same in both situations, and it turns out to be not very much at all.