Don’t regret the path not taken — it’s probably worse than you imagine
Bestselling author Daniel Pink has a new book called “The Power of Regret,” in which, according to a Wall Street Journal piece by Pink, he argues: “Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Equally important, regret is valuable.”
It is true that you can learn from regret, adjusting your life to avoid future missteps. It’s also undeniable that even if you aim for “no regrets,” being human, you will fail.
But that doesn’t mean regret doesn’t feel awful, and that you should do everything you can to avoid fruitless suffering over paths not taken.
Which, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a lot of us needlessly subject ourselves to. The research found people tend to idealize the choices they didn’t make. Sometimes Pink is right and the path not taken was the better bet and cause for reflection.
But other times, the path not taken was way crummier than you imagine. Telling the difference between these two possibilities can save you a lot of misery.
For regrets to make sense, it must be true that you genuinely would have been better off taking the other option.
Sometimes it’s easy to evaluate if this is true. If someone asks why you regret not buying bitcoin in 2018, you can just point to a graph of its rising price.
But most regrets aren’t like that. They’re based on how we imagine things would have turned out had we taken a different path. This is the kind of regret where you sit and wonder if you hadn’t broken up with that college flame, or look at your mediocre meal and tell yourself, “I should have ordered the steak.”
Would the steak actually have been better than the pasta? Would you and your college girlfriend have gone on to romantic bliss? The only way to answer these questions is to use your imagination. And according to a study from Dartmouth and the University of Navarra, our imaginations are pretty unreliable when it comes to evaluating options not taken.
The research team asked 800 participants to choose the most attractive pair of a set of nine blurred faces. Participants then had to pick their top face, which was revealed, unblurred. The researchers then asked participants how much they regretted their choice, but with a twist: Sometimes the other, rejected finalist was also revealed. Sometimes it remained blurred. What did this exercise reveal?
“The team found that when the rejected face remained blurred, participants were more likely to report feeling regret about their choice, and also expected the face to be more attractive compared to the actual attractiveness ratings given by participants for whom it was visible. In other words, participants who never found out what the rejected face looked like overestimated its attractiveness, and this seemed to lead to feelings of regret about not choosing it,” sums up the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog.
Before you start unwinding a regret, it’s worth considering whether it should be a regret at all.
Ask yourself how you’re so sure the grass would have been greener had you gone the other way, and whether you’re taking full account of the downsides of the path not traveled. You’ll probably eliminate or reduce more than a few regrets without any other action at all.