Regret Aversion

At a Glance

1. Quick Summary

Regret aversion is what happens when the fear of kicking yourself later makes the decision for you. Before choosing, people run a quick simulation: if this goes wrong, how bad will I feel, and how easy will it be to see that I could have done otherwise? Options that would leave a vivid, self-inflicted "if only" get avoided, even when they offer better odds. That is why people keep the lottery ticket they were handed, hold a losing stock rather than sell it, and stay in the default pension fund. Regret theory, proposed independently by David Bell and by Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden in 1982, made this emotion part of a formal model of choice under risk. The bias has no fixed direction, though: when doing nothing is the choice that would look foolish afterwards, the same fear drives people to act.

Simply About the Bias

Regret aversion means picking the thing you won't feel bad about later, instead of the thing most likely to turn out well. Your brain imagines the "if only I had..." feeling ahead of time and steers you away from it.

Say a friend offers to swap raffle tickets with you. Both tickets have exactly the same chance of winning. Most people still say no. Why? If you swap and your old ticket wins, you'll feel awful, and it will feel like your fault. Keeping your ticket feels safer, even though it isn't. Tests work the same way. You pick answer B, then start to doubt it. Lots of kids leave it alone, because changing a right answer to a wrong one feels worse than keeping a wrong one.

Here's a trick. When you notice you're choosing something "so I won't feel bad," ask one question: "Which choice is more likely to work?" Then pick that one. Feeling bad for a while is smaller than it seems ahead of time.

2. The Science Behind It

2.1. Discovery and History

Regret entered decision theory before it entered psychology. In 1951 the statistician Leonard Savage proposed a "minimax regret" rule: for each option, find the worst gap between what you got and what you could have got, and pick the option where that worst gap is smallest. It was a normative tool, with no claim about feelings.

The psychological version arrived in 1982, when David Bell published "Regret in decision making under uncertainty" in Operations Research and Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden published "Regret theory" in The Economic Journal. Peter Fishburn developed a related model the same year. The idea is that the value of an outcome depends partly on what the rejected option would have delivered. Winning $100 feels different when the bet you turned down paid $1,000. Loomes and Sugden showed that this single assumption could account for puzzles expected utility theory could not, including the Allais paradox.

Also in 1982, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky brought the idea into everyday judgment. In "The psychology of preferences" (Scientific American) they described two investors. Paul owns shares in company A, considers switching to company B, and stays. George owns shares in B and switches to A. Each learns he would have been $1,200 better off with the other stock. The large majority of respondents said George, the one who acted, felt worse. Kahneman and Dale Miller's norm theory (1986) gave the reason: outcomes that follow unusual actions are easy to "undo" in imagination, so they hurt more.

In 1990 Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron found that many participants would not vaccinate a hypothetical child when a death caused by the vaccine felt worse than a likelier death from the disease. Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec then showed that the action effect holds mainly in the short term. Looking back over their lives, people mostly regret what they failed to do (Psychological Review, 1995). A preregistered replication by Siu Kit Yeung and Gilad Feldman (2022, Collabra: Psychology, 988 participants) supported most of the pattern with weaker effects and failed to reproduce one of the original studies.

In 2002 Marcel Zeelenberg and colleagues added that after a previous bad outcome, inaction looks like the abnormal choice and is regretted more (the "inaction effect"). Regret aversion has no built-in preference for doing nothing. It steers people away from whichever mistake would be easiest to pin on themselves.

Key milestones:

• 1951: Savage's minimax regret criterion
• 1982: Regret theory (Bell; Loomes and Sugden); Kahneman and Tversky's investor scenario
• 1985: Shefrin and Statman tie regret to the disposition effect
• 1995: Gilovich and Medvec's temporal pattern of action and inaction regrets
• 1996: Zeelenberg et al. on expected feedback; Bar-Hillel and Neter on lottery tickets
• 2002: Zeelenberg et al. describe the inaction effect
• 2004: The Dutch Postcode Lottery study; Gilbert et al. on overpredicted regret
• 2022: Yeung and Feldman's preregistered replication

2.2. Key Researchers

2.3. Landmark Studies

Expected Feedback and Risky Choice (Zeelenberg, Beattie, van der Pligt & de Vries, 1996)

Participants chose between safer and riskier gambles while the researchers varied what they would learn afterwards. When people expected to see how the risky gamble turned out even if they chose the safe one, they picked the risky option more often, because that removed the chance of finding out they had passed up a win. Regret aversion is about information: people avoid the option that would expose them to a painful comparison, and that can make them more risk-seeking as well as more cautious.

Why People Won't Trade Lottery Tickets (Bar-Hillel & Neter, 1996)

Participants given a lottery ticket were asked to swap it for another ticket in the same lottery, sometimes with a small bonus for trading. Many refused, although the swap left their odds unchanged and the bonus made it strictly better. They were far more willing to swap pens, which carry no uncertain outcome. The authors traced the refusal to anticipated regret: if the ticket you gave away wins, the loss is vivid and your own doing. Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich (2007) later added a "tempting fate" explanation.

The Dutch Postcode Lottery (Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2004)

In the Netherlands' Postcode Lottery the winning "number" is a postcode. If your postcode is drawn and you didn't buy a ticket, your neighbors win and you find out. In the state lottery, non-players never learn whether their numbers would have come up. Zeelenberg and Pieters found that anticipated regret predicted intention to play the Postcode Lottery but not the state lottery. Here regret aversion pushes people to act, because not buying is the mistake that will be exposed.

The Temporal Pattern of Regret (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994, 1995)

Asked about their biggest regrets, groups ranging from nursing-home residents to college students named more inactions (the course not taken, the person never asked out) than actions; over the past week, action regrets were more common. People repair or reframe bad actions, the authors argue, while unrealized possibilities keep growing in imagination.

Looking Forward to Looking Backward (Gilbert, Morewedge, Risen & Wilson, 2004)

Commuters who imagined missing a train by one minute predicted much more regret than those imagining a five-minute miss. Commuters who actually missed it reported less regret than predicted, and the one-minute group was no more upset than the five-minute group, because people blamed circumstances more readily than they had expected. If the regret we fear is larger than the regret we feel, paying to avoid it is a poor trade.

2.4. Neurological Basis

The neuroscience of regret is thin compared with its behavioral literature, but two studies are widely cited. Nathalie Camille and colleagues (2004, Science) gave a gambling task to healthy volunteers and to patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex. Healthy participants felt worse when they learned the rejected gamble would have paid more, and their choices came to reflect that anticipation. The patients reacted to their own wins and losses but showed no sign of regret about the option they had passed up.

Giorgio Coricelli and colleagues (2005, Nature Neuroscience) used fMRI with a similar task. Activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex tracked the size of experienced regret, and as participants learned to avoid regret, orbitofrontal activity began to appear before they chose. The samples are small and there is no single "regret center," but the picture is consistent: the orbitofrontal cortex compares what happened with what could have happened, and that comparison shapes later choices.

3. Evolutionary Origins

Regret works as a learning signal. An animal that compares the reward it got with the reward it could have got learns faster than one that only notes whether it was rewarded. Zeelenberg and Pieters' regret regulation theory treats regret in these terms: an unpleasant state whose job is to correct mistakes.

Anticipated regret is the same signal run forward. If an option tends to produce bitter comparisons, avoiding it saves the cost of learning the hard way. In small groups where reputation lasted a lifetime there was a social side too. A choice that was clearly your doing and went badly invited blame; following custom gave cover. Terry Connolly and Zeelenberg's decision justification theory (2002) makes this explicit: we regret most the choices we cannot defend, so we lean toward choices that are easy to justify.

The modern mismatch is that the threat being avoided is often only a feeling. A retirement portfolio is not a foraging patch, and the regret from a reasonable decision that happened to turn out badly protects no one. The signal fires anyway.

4. How This Bias Manifests

4.1. In Everyday Life

• Keeping the first answer on a test, although studies of answer changing generally find that changes more often go from wrong to right
• Refusing to swap a raffle ticket or switch checkout lines, in case the old one wins or speeds up
• Buying immediately rather than waiting for a likely sale, because missing the item would hurt more than overpaying
• Staying in a city, relationship or hobby because leaving and then missing it would be "my fault"
• Joining an office lottery pool because watching colleagues celebrate without you would be unbearable

4.2. In the Workplace

• Hiring the conventional candidate over a stronger but unusual one, because a failed unusual hire is blamed on whoever chose them
• Choosing the famous vendor, in the spirit of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM"
• Staying in a job that no longer fits because leaving and regretting it feels worse than drifting
• Delaying a decision for more data, so any failure can be blamed on circumstances
• Negotiators changing their offers when they expect to learn the other side's position; Larrick and Boles (1995) found that expected feedback changed how people bargained

4.3. In Business and Marketing

• "Last chance" and "only 3 left" messages that invite customers to imagine missing out
• Lotteries designed so that non-players learn they would have won
• Price-match guarantees and generous return policies, which remove the regret of a later discount or a bad fit
• Market leaders gaining when shoppers pick the familiar brand; Itamar Simonson (1992) found that asking consumers to imagine regret pushed them toward well-known brands

4.4. In Politics and Media

• Officials favoring visible precautions so no one can say they did nothing, even when the precautions are costly
• In other settings, officials avoiding reform because a failed reform is blamed on its author while a festering problem is blamed on circumstances
• Get-out-the-vote messages asking people to imagine waking up after the election wishing they had voted

4.5. In Healthcare

• Some parents declining a vaccine whose small risk would feel like their doing, while accepting the larger risk of the disease (Ritov & Baron, 1990)
• The opposite pattern elsewhere: Noel Brewer, Jessica DeFrank and Melissa Gilkey's 2016 meta-analysis in Health Psychology found anticipated regret associated with stronger intentions and behaviors such as vaccination and screening, with regret about not acting playing a notable part
• Doctors ordering extra tests to avoid the regret of a missed diagnosis
• Patients choosing aggressive treatment for low-risk conditions because "at least I did everything"

4.6. In Finance and Investing

• Selling winners too early and holding losers too long; Shefrin and Statman (1985) attributed this partly to regret, since selling a loser makes the mistake final
• Splitting money 50/50 between stocks and bonds to limit future regret rather than to fit a goal
• Staying in cash after a drop because buying before a further fall would feel worse than missing a recovery
• Chasing a rally late because watching others profit is unbearable, the version of the bias that pushes toward action

5. Real-World Case Studies

Case Study 1: Harry Markowitz's Retirement Portfolio

• Context: Harry Markowitz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in economics for portfolio theory, the mathematics of balancing risk and return across assets.
• What happened: Asked by the journalist Jason Zweig in the late 1990s how he had invested his own retirement savings, Markowitz said he had not used his model. He pictured how he would feel if stocks soared while he was out, or crashed while he was fully in, and split his contributions evenly between stocks and bonds.
• The bias at work: The 50/50 split was chosen to keep the worst feeling small. Whatever the market did, he could tell himself he had been half right.
• Consequences: No disaster, but for a saver with decades ahead a regret-minimizing split usually means lower expected wealth than a portfolio chosen for the goal.
• Lessons learned: Knowing the theory does not switch off the emotion. A rule like 50/50 may be worth some lost return if it helps you stay invested through bad markets, but that trade should be made on purpose.

Case Study 2: The Dutch Postcode Lottery

• Context: The Nationale Postcode Loterij draws postcodes instead of numbers, and ticket holders in a winning postcode share the prize.
• What happened: A household that does not play still learns when its postcode wins, because the neighbors win. Zeelenberg and Pieters (2004) found that anticipated regret predicted intention to play this lottery but not the state lottery.
• The bias at work: The lottery's design makes not buying the choice whose bad outcome is visible and personal, so regret aversion pushes toward buying.
• Consequences: People buy tickets with negative expected value largely to avoid a feeling.
• Lessons learned: When a product is built so that not buying will be exposed, ask whether you want the thing or only want to avoid the comparison.

Historical Example: The 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program

In February 1976 a new swine influenza strain killed a soldier at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Officials remembered 1918 and feared a pandemic. Vaccinating everyone and seeing no pandemic would cost money and some side effects; waiting while a pandemic struck would make them the people who saw it coming and did nothing. A line that circulated at the time put it plainly: better a vaccine without an epidemic than an epidemic without a vaccine.

In March 1976 President Ford announced a program to vaccinate the whole population, and more than 40 million Americans were vaccinated that autumn. The pandemic never came. Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported among recipients, and the program was suspended in December. Richard Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg's later report, The Swine Flu Affair, faulted officials for committing early to a full program instead of building in points to reconsider as evidence arrived.

Here anticipated regret pushed toward action, because inaction was the blameworthy option. The bias that leads some parents to skip a vaccine led officials to over-commit to one.

6. The Cost of This Bias

6.1. Personal Costs

• Missed jobs, moves and relationships, the regrets people report most late in life
• Money spent on small-item warranties, insurance and full prices to avoid the regret of a later discount
• Staying too long in jobs or relationships that no longer work
• Paralysis when every option carries a possible "if only," and lower satisfaction for maximizers who compare every choice with the alternatives (Schwartz et al., 2002)

6.2. Professional Costs

• Hiring and vendor choices that trade performance for defensibility
• Promising but risky proposals that never get championed
• Slow decisions, since waiting shifts blame to circumstances
• Defensive testing in medicine, driven partly by fear of a missed diagnosis

6.3. Societal Costs

• Underuse of vaccines and preventive care when side effects would feel self-caused
• Overreaction when inaction is the blameworthy option, as in 1976
• Policy inertia, because reformers carry the regret of failure and defenders of the status quo do not
• Lottery revenue from designs that make not playing visible

6.4. Statistical Impact

• In Odean's 1998 study of 10,000 brokerage accounts, investors were about 1.5 times more likely to sell a winning stock than a losing one, and the winners they sold beat the losers they held by 3.4 percentage points over the next year; regret aversion is one proposed explanation, and some later work argues that changing beliefs explain the pattern better
• In Kahneman and Tversky's scenario, the large majority attributed more regret to the investor who switched than to the one who stayed
• Gilbert et al. (2004) found commuters who missed a train by one minute felt no more regret than those who missed by five, despite predicting much more
• Yeung and Feldman (2022, N = 988) reproduced the short-term action, long-term inaction pattern in most replicated studies, with smaller effects than the originals
• Bar-Eli et al. (2007), analyzing 286 penalty kicks, found goalkeepers stayed in the center only 6.3% of the time although it was statistically their best option, since a goal conceded while standing still looks like a failure to act

7. The Hidden Benefits

The emotion that regret aversion anticipates is one of the main ways people learn from experience.

• Learning from mistakes: Regret marks the decisions worth revisiting. Zeelenberg and Pieters argue that this is its purpose.
• Motivation to act on important things: Anticipated regret about not acting gets people vaccinated, screened and saving for retirement, and pushes them to say the thing they would hate to leave unsaid.
• A brake on reckless risk: Imagining the regret of a drunk drive home or a ruinous bet is sensible.

The benefits shrink when the feared regret is about visibility rather than quality, when the stakes are low, or when the regret we expect is larger than the regret we will feel.

8. Self-Assessment: Do You Have This Bias?

8.1. Warning Signs Checklist

• You often choose the option that would be easiest to defend if it failed, rather than the one most likely to succeed
• You avoid checking how the option you turned down worked out
• You stick with your first answer, current provider or usual order because changing might backfire
• You regularly buy extended warranties on inexpensive items
• You hold investments that are down because selling would make the loss "real"
• You put off decisions until circumstances make them for you
• Offers that are about to expire make you buy things you had not planned to buy
• You can name things you have wanted to try for years but never started
• After a decision you spend a lot of time imagining how the alternative would have gone
• You prefer group decisions partly so that a bad result is not yours alone

Scoring:

• 0-2 checked: Low susceptibility
• 3-5 checked: Moderate susceptibility
• 6-8 checked: High susceptibility
• 9-10 checked: Very high susceptibility

8.2. Self-Reflection Questions

1. What is your biggest regret from the past ten years, and was it something you did or something you didn't do?
2. Think of a recent choice where you took the safe default. Would you have chosen the same way if you would never learn how the other option turned out?
3. When you imagine a decision going wrong, whose judgment do you fear most: your own or someone else's?
4. Have you paid extra (a warranty, a higher price, a delay) mainly to avoid feeling foolish later? Was it worth it?
5. How did the regret you felt after a bad decision compare with the regret you feared beforehand?

8.3. Quick Diagnostic Scenario

Scenario: You are offered a job with a 20% raise and more interesting work at a smaller, less established company. Your current job is stable but no longer challenges you. You think there is a fair chance the new job works out well.

How would you respond?

• A) Stay put, because if the new company struggled you'd never forgive yourself for leaving a secure job → High susceptibility
• B) Ask for more and more information and hope the offer expires or something decides for you → Moderate susceptibility
• C) Compare the likely outcomes of both options, including how you'd feel in five years about never having tried, and decide on that basis → Low susceptibility

9. Identifying This Bias in Others

9.1. Behavioral Indicators

• Defaulting to brand names, established suppliers and familiar procedures even when evidence favors alternatives
• Not looking at how a declined offer or a sold stock fared
• Asking for more data or more sign-offs before any decision that would clearly be their own
• Sudden decisive action after a run of bad outcomes, once inaction starts to feel like the abnormal choice

9.2. Conversational Red Flags

Phrases people say when under this bias:

• "If it goes wrong, at least we did what everyone does."
• "I'd never forgive myself if..."
• "Let's wait and see."
• "I don't want to look back and think I blew it."

Types of arguments they make:

• Which choice would be easier to explain if it failed
• Worst-case feelings rather than likely outcomes

Questions they avoid asking:

• "Which option has the better expected outcome?"
• "How would I actually feel about this in a year?"

9.3. Situational Triggers

• Decisions where the result of the rejected option will be revealed
• An obvious default or status quo
• High-visibility decisions that others will judge afterwards
• A recent bad outcome, which can flip the bias toward action
• Expiring offers and "last chance" framing

10. Cognitive Debiasing Strategies

10.1. Immediate Techniques

• Name the regret: Write down the regret you are trying to avoid, then ask whether it is about the outcome or about blame and visibility.
• Two-sided regret check: Imagine the bad outcome for each option, including doing nothing. People routinely forget that inaction produces regret too, especially over long periods.
• Probability first: Estimate which option is more likely to work before you consult your feelings. Let feelings break ties.
• The ten-year test: Ask how you will see this decision in ten years. Long-run regrets center on things not done.
• Discount the forecast: People overestimate future regret (Gilbert et al., 2004), so scale your imagined regret down.

10.2. Long-Term Strategies

• Decision journals: Record decisions, reasons and the information available, so you can judge a decision by what you knew rather than by how it turned out.
• Pre-commit to rules: "Rebalance every January" or "sell any position that breaks my exit criteria" takes regret-loaded choices out of the moment.
• Practise small regrets: Try new restaurants, routes and products. Survivable regrets weaken the fear of larger ones.

10.3. Environmental Design

• Set good defaults: Since the bias favors the default, make the default the option most people should choose, such as automatic pension enrollment in a diversified fund.
• Make reversals easy: Trial periods and simple cancellation lower the fear of a mistake.
• Reward process, not outcome: Teams that punish reasonable decisions that turned out badly teach people to avoid acting.
• Share responsibility: Joint sign-off on sensible but risky choices removes some of the personal regret.

10.4. When to Seek External Input

• When your choice is mainly about avoiding blame
• When you have been putting off a decision for weeks or months
• When a recent bad outcome is making you want to do something, anything

Whom to ask: someone who does not share your exposure to blame, such as a fee-only financial advisor, a mentor outside your organization, or a clinician giving a second opinion. Ask them: "If you didn't care how this looked afterwards, which would you choose?"

11. Practical Exercises

Exercise 1: The Regret Ledger

• Objective: Compare anticipated regret with actual regret
• Time required: 5 minutes per decision, 20 minutes monthly review
• Materials needed: Notebook or spreadsheet
• Difficulty level: Beginner
• Instructions:
  1. Before a meaningful decision, write down the option you chose and the one you rejected
  2. Rate from 1 to 10 how much regret you expect if your choice turns out badly
  3. When the outcome is known, rate the regret you actually feel
  4. Note whether you blamed yourself or circumstances
  5. Each month, compare predicted and actual regret
• Reflection questions:
  • Is your predicted regret consistently higher than what you feel?
• Frequency: Ongoing, with monthly reviews for at least three months

Exercise 2: The Inaction Audit

• Objective: Make the costs of not acting as visible as the costs of acting
• Time required: 30 minutes
• Materials needed: Paper and pen
• Difficulty level: Intermediate
• Instructions:
  1. List five decisions you have been putting off (a job, a health check, an investment, a conversation)
  2. For each, write what will probably happen in one year and in five years if you do nothing
  3. Rate how much you would regret those outcomes
  4. Write the probable result of acting, and rate the regret if acting goes badly
  5. Pick one item where inaction carries more expected regret and take the first step this week
• Reflection questions:
  • Which costs of inaction had you not considered?
  • What made acting feel riskier than it was?
• Frequency: Quarterly

Exercise 3: The Blind Decision

• Objective: Separate the quality of a choice from the fear of seeing the rejected option's outcome
• Time required: 15 minutes per decision
• Materials needed: A pending decision whose rejected option you would normally track
• Difficulty level: Advanced
• Instructions:
  1. Pick a decision where you would normally follow how the rejected option turned out (a stock you might sell, a job you might decline)
  2. Ask: "If I would never learn how the other option turned out, which would I choose?"
  3. Compare this answer with your current preference
  4. If they differ, write down why; the difference is your regret aversion at work
  5. Go with the blind answer unless you can name a reason beyond feelings
• Reflection questions:
  • How often did the blind answer differ from your first instinct?
• Frequency: For every significant decision for one month

Daily Practice

The "Which Regret?" Question

Each time you catch yourself playing it safe, ask: "Am I avoiding a bad outcome or just avoiding feeling responsible for one?"

• Suggested duration: 1-2 minutes per instance
• Best time of day: At the moment of decision, especially shopping and work choices
• How to track progress: Tally how often the honest answer was "feeling responsible"

Weekly Challenge

Make One Small Reversible Change

Each week, change one small default: a new route, a different supplier, a new dish, or a test answer you have good reason to change.

• Expected outcomes after 4 weeks: Less fear of small regrets and a better sense of how often changes pay off
• Journaling prompts for reflection:
  • How bad did the regret feel when a change went wrong?
  • Which defaults were you protecting for no good reason?

12. For Specific Audiences

For Leaders and Managers

• Blame and innovation: If people are punished for sensible decisions that went badly, they learn regret aversion fast. Judge decisions by the process and information at the time.
• Count inaction costs: Ask teams to estimate the cost of not launching, not hiring or not changing, next to the risks of acting.

For Parents and Educators

• Age-appropriate explanation: "Sometimes we choose something just so we won't feel bad if it goes wrong. Feeling bad for a little while isn't the end of the world. It's better to choose what's most likely to work."
• Test strategy: Teach that changing an answer is often right when there is a good reason, and that a first instinct is not automatically safer.
• Small, survivable regrets: Let children make low-stakes choices and live with the results.

For Healthcare Professionals

• Two-sided counseling: When patients hesitate over vaccines or treatment, help them picture both regrets: a side effect, and the disease or progression they could have prevented.
• Defensive testing: Notice when a test is ordered mainly to avoid future regret rather than to change management.
• Shared decision-making: An explicitly joint choice reduces a patient's fear that the outcome will be entirely their fault.

For Financial Professionals

• Disposition effect: Clients who won't sell losers may be avoiding making a loss final. Reframe the sale as reallocation: "Where would this money do best from today?"
• Rule-based rebalancing: Pre-agreed rules take regret-loaded decisions out of volatile moments.
• Cash on the sidelines: Phased investing can help clients act when the regret of buying before a further fall is holding them back.
• Comfort versus return: A regret-minimizing split may suit some clients, but say openly what it costs in expected return.

13. Interactions with Other Biases

Biases That Amplify This One

Biases That Counteract This One

Common Bias Chains

Hindsight Bias → Regret Aversion → Omission Bias → Status Quo Bias

After a bad outcome, Hindsight Bias makes the right choice look obvious, so the person blames themselves harshly. Next time, Regret Aversion steers them away from any choice that could bring back that feeling. Harms from acting feel more like one's own fault (Omission Bias), so they default to inaction, and the existing arrangement hardens (Status Quo Bias).

Interrupting the chain: Intervene at the review after a bad outcome. Judging the decision by what was known at the time keeps hindsight from teaching the wrong lesson.

14. Cultural Perspectives

Regret appears in every culture studied, but what people regret varies. Gilovich, Wang, Regan and Nishina (2003, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology) found that inactions dominated long-term regrets in Chinese and Japanese samples as they do in American ones. Seger Breugelmans and colleagues (2014, Emotion) compared regret across several countries and found a shared core alongside differences in which life domains people regretted.

Claims that interdependent cultures regret relationships more and individualistic cultures regret missed achievements are suggestive, not settled. What matters most for regret aversion is local norms about the "normal" choice, because regret attaches to departures from it.

15. Myths and Misconceptions

16. Expert Insights

"My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities." — Harry Markowitz, interviewed by Jason Zweig for Money (1998), as reproduced in Zweig, "What Harry Markowitz Meant," jasonzweig.com (2017)

"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." — Jeff Bezos, interview at the American Academy of Achievement Summit, San Antonio (May 4, 2001), on the "regret minimization framework" behind leaving a finance job to start Amazon

Paraphrasing: in the short run people feel worse about what they did, but in the long run the things they failed to do come to dominate their regrets. — Thomas Gilovich & Victoria Husted Medvec, Psychological Review (1995)

Paraphrasing: regret is a functional emotion, unpleasant because its job is to make us correct mistakes and avoid repeating them. — Marcel Zeelenberg & Rik Pieters, Journal of Consumer Psychology (2007)

17. Key Takeaways

1. Regret is a comparison: We feel it when we compare what happened with what a different choice would have brought. Bell (1982) and Loomes and Sugden (1982) built that comparison into a formal theory of choice.

2. Feedback drives the bias: People avoid the option whose foregone outcome they would learn about (Zeelenberg et al., 1996). Change what people will find out and you change what they choose.

3. It has no fixed direction: It often favors defaults and inaction, but after a prior failure, or when not acting will be exposed, it pushes toward action.

4. Timing matters: Actions sting more at first; inactions dominate over a lifetime (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995). A 2022 preregistered replication supported this with smaller effects.

5. We overestimate future regret: People predict more regret than they feel (Gilbert et al., 2004), so the price paid to avoid it is often too high.

6. It costs money and opportunity: It is one proposed driver of the disposition effect, of overpaying for protection, and of career moves never made. Its exact role in investor behavior is still debated.

7. Compare both regrets: Imagine the regret of acting and of not acting, scale both down, then choose on likely outcomes. Judge past decisions by what you knew at the time.

18. Further Resources

Academic Papers

• Bell, D. E. (1982). Regret in decision making under uncertainty. Operations Research, 30(5), 961-981. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.30.5.961
• Loomes, G., & Sugden, R. (1982). Regret theory: An alternative theory of rational choice under uncertainty. The Economic Journal, 92(368), 805-824. https://doi.org/10.2307/2232669
• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The psychology of preferences. Scientific American, 246(1), 160-173. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0182-160
• Shefrin, H., & Statman, M. (1985). The disposition to sell winners too early and ride losers too long: Theory and evidence. Journal of Finance, 40(3), 777-790. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1985.tb05002.x
• Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1990). Reluctance to vaccinate: Omission bias and ambiguity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 3(4), 263-277. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.3960030404
• Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of regret: What, when, and why. Psychological Review, 102(2), 379-395. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.102.2.379
• Zeelenberg, M., Beattie, J., van der Pligt, J., & de Vries, N. K. (1996). Consequences of regret aversion: Effects of expected feedback on risky decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 65(2), 148-158. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1996.0013
• Bar-Hillel, M., & Neter, E. (1996). Why are people reluctant to exchange lottery tickets? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 17-27. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.1.17
• Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2004). Consequences of regret aversion in real life: The case of the Dutch postcode lottery. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 93(2), 155-168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2003.10.001
• Gilbert, D. T., Morewedge, C. K., Risen, J. L., & Wilson, T. D. (2004). Looking forward to looking backward: The misprediction of regret. Psychological Science, 15(5), 346-350. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00681.x
• Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2007). A theory of regret regulation 1.0. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17(1), 3-18. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1701_3
• Yeung, S. K., & Feldman, G. (2022). Revisiting the temporal pattern of regret in action versus inaction: Replication of Gilovich and Medvec (1994) with extensions examining responsibility. Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 37122. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.37122

Books

• Landman, J. (1993). Regret: The Persistence of the Possible. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195071788.001.0001
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Pink, D. H. (2022). The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. Riverhead Books.

Book Chapters

• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (pp. 201-208). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511809477.015

19. Summary Card

20. Glossary of Terms Used

21. Discussion Questions

For book clubs, classrooms, or self-reflection:

1. Think of the biggest regret in your life so far. Was it something you did or something you didn't do? Does that fit Gilovich and Medvec's pattern?

2. Harry Markowitz split his retirement savings 50/50 to limit regret instead of following his own Nobel-winning theory. Was that a mistake, or a sensible way to make sure he stuck with a plan?

3. The Dutch Postcode Lottery is built so that non-players learn they would have won. Is it fair for businesses to use anticipated regret this way? Where would you draw the line?

4. In 1976 anticipated regret pushed officials to vaccinate tens of millions of people against a pandemic that never came, while today regret pushes some parents away from vaccines. What does it mean that one emotion produces opposite errors?

5. If people consistently overpredict their future regret, should we teach children to ignore anticipated regret, or to use it differently?

Zuletzt aktualisiert: 4 November 2026