By Deborah Gilbert
News and Information Services
Echoing folk wisdom, pop psychology urges us not to cry over spilled milk because regret cripples us. “That was then; this is now,” we are told.
But Janet Landman, a U-M psychologist, argues in her new book, Regret: The Persistence of the Possible (Oxford University Press, 1993), that “too often we rush to sidestep or conquer regret.” Indeed, she notes, if we allow ourselves to experience it fully, to imagine the “what ifs,” and to consider how we might have avoided our mistakes, regret can change us for the better.
“Feeling regret is controversial in our culture—we are taught emotional self-control. But research shows that fully experiencing regrets may be the miracle ingredient to transforming them,” Landman says.
For instance, a recent study of chronic worriers and people with anxiety disorders, conducted by Thomas Borkovec and Jonathan Inz, found that the most anxious thought too much about their fears and felt them too little. On the other hand, those who were not chronically anxious felt their occasional fears intensely but got over them.
“Transcending regret requires a similar sort of emotional courage,” Landman says. “We must feel regret fully as we think about it in order to learn from it and make the most of our second chances.”
The question “What do most people regret?” has received little empirical attention. Gallup Polls asked Americans about the “might-have-been” aspects of regret in 1949, 1953 and 1965, and Landman and her colleague, researcher Jean D. Manis, analyzed data on regret in the early 1980s.
The proportion of people who say there are things they would do differently in their lives typically ranges between 35 percent and 65 percent, but the willingness to acknowledge regret varies by era. In 1949, 69 percent specified at least one serious regret.
Similarly, in 1965, 64 percent of the Gallup national sample had regrets, as did 54 percent of a state of Michigan sample analyzed by Landman and Manis in the 1980s.
“But in 1953—a period of greater complacency perhaps—only 39 percent of the men and 35 percent of the women said they would live their lives differently,” Landman says.
The leading regret in all the surveys was “not enough education.” Work-related regrets ran a distant second or third, with a considerable proportion of people saying they would choose a different occupation if they had it to do over.
“Men and women may regret the kind of jobs they’ve had, but for women, an added source of regret is whether or not they worked outside the home,” Landman adds. For instance, a study in the 1970s of 1,000 women born around 1910 found that although 41 percent had been homemakers, only 29 percent would make the same choice again. In the early 1980s, when Landman and Manis analyzed data from more than 1,100 women who had been polled in the mid-1970s, they got similar results—61 percent regretted putting off their careers in favor of early marriage and childrearing.
“In fact, early marriage—and choice of marriage partner—often ties with job regrets as the second or third most common regret of all,” Landman says.
People vary in how intensely and how often they feel regret. “The prevailing wisdom is that women and the middle-aged are most vulnerable to regret, but so far there seems to be little difference by gender or age,” Landman says.
In two studies of U-M students, she found that all reported at least one regret. “Calvin R. Chin and I also found in his honors thesis that, for the most part, college-age men and women regret the same things to the same degree—not giving enough attention to education and to friendships—and with considerable frequency,” she adds.
Personality also plays a role in individuals’ responses to regret. “It stands to reason that imaginative, sensitive introverts may suffer regret more than others. Anyone who engages in a lot of counterfactual thinking—‘if onlys’ and ‘what might have beens’—may be especially susceptible to regret,” Landman says.
The U-M student studies support that supposition. “We found that students who ruminated the most did, in fact, report the most regret. It seems that obsessive ruminators do what many of us do, only more so. They try to use thought to bully their feelings into submission. Ironically, as research with the chronically anxious demonstrates, it could be more beneficial in the long run if they surrendered to their feelings while thinking them through.”
On the other hand, there are people whose regrets stem from their tendency to think too little.
“People who habitually ignore the rules of good decision-making—considering the alternatives carefully, gathering good information about the alternatives, knowing what they really want and what is really possible—are at great risk for regret. Such people need to think twice before they make important decisions. Regret, or fear of regret, can perform a valuable function for those who tend to make heedless decisions.”
People with low self-esteem appear to suffer more from regret than people with higher self-esteem. Citing research conducted by Robert A. Josephs, Richard P. Larrick, Claude M. Steele and Richard E. Nisbett, Landman says that people with low self-esteem appear to be particularly attuned to the pitfalls of risky decisions rather than to the possible payoffs, so they may miss good opportunities.
“They also prefer to make choices that don’t offer feedback about the alternative outcomes. They don’t want to know if they made mistakes. Unfortunately, that also means they may not learn from their mistakes,” Landman says.
People who don’t deceive themselves—who are honest with themselves about their failings—also are more vulnerable to both depression and regret. However, if these individuals—and people in general—have the courage to experience regret, and then take action to repair them or sidestep similar mistakes in the future, they are more likely to transcend the experience and be better off in the long run, Landman says.
