Hidden Brain - Regrets, I Have A Few...

Episode Date: September 12, 2017

We all have regrets. By some estimates, regret is one of the most common emotions experienced in our daily lives. This week we'll hear listeners' stories of regret, and talk with psychology professor Amy Summerville. She runs the Regret Lab at Miami University in Ohio. Summerville says regret doesn't always have to be a negative force in our lives. Sometimes, it can be a hopeful emotion.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantin. Whether or not you believe in them, you probably have ghosts that hunt you. Not something sinister, but something that you just can't get rid of. These ghosts are relentless and they will make you rehash details from your past, over and over again. Hello, Sean Carr and friends. Hello, Sean Carr. Hi. I was calling about, also, I sang it,

records I've had a few, so I won't list all of them. My boyfriend of a year and I end up in a relationship. It's just looking back and thinking that I could have done better. And I didn't. All these things keep popping in my head of small things. Maybe something I should have said differently or something I should have done differently in a particular conversation or on a particular event. It makes me cringe with regret and shame. I haven't a fair. I don't know that it's not a secret, but it's a regret. My great regret is leaving Woodstock on Saturday morning. I was an evangelical Christian at

the time and I remember my friends asking me if I thought they were going to hell. And I told them that I thought they would go to hell if they did not become Christian. And it's something that's bothered me for the last 10 years. I am experiencing regrets on sometimes a minute by minute basis. And it is the biggest regret of my life, honestly. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye. Today on Hidden Brain, we're going to talk about regrets.

Amy Samolville is a psychology professor at Miami University of Ohio. She runs the regret lab where she studies how people think about the choices they made and the choices they wish they'd made. Amy, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hi, it's great to talk to you. You know, I was fascinated when I heard that you run a regret lab and I was fascinated when I heard that you run a regret lab. I was fascinated because I was wondering, what prompt someone to spend so much time studying regret? What drew you to the subject?

I don't know that I have a particular deep backstory about how I got into regret. I actually was just generally interested in social psychology. One of the things that then drew me to regret from that is the fact that regret is among our most common emotions. By some estimates, it's the second most common emotion mentioned in daily life, and the most common negative emotion that we mention. And so this is really a pervasive part of how people experience the world around them. And as I learned more, I really started to realize that

regret is actually a very hopeful emotion. It's something that is helping us learn from our mistakes and do better in the future. So it's actually, I think, a really positive thing to get to study. Amy, I'd like to structure this conversation around a couple of stories of regret. We actually reached out to listeners of Hidden Brain some time ago and they sent in stories

about some of the things they regret in life. One came from Tom Bond's saint of Arlington, Virginia. Here's the tip. I regret not taking the lead in a school play when I was in ninth grade. I was in a nine through twelve school and I was surprised to receive a lead as a freshman. It was somewhat of a big deal, considering that freshmen typically don't get those sort of roles.

And rather than accept the fact that the director felt like I would be a good choice for the role, I listened to people who said that I probably couldn't handle it and therefore decided to turn the role down. Later on in life life I realized that when people present me with an opportunity like that, if they have the confidence in me being able to be successful, they're likely not putting me in that place to fail. And so, since then, I feel like I've gotten a new confidence. And so, when faced with a similar situation

in the current dice, I've been much more likely to put my hand up and say yes. I'm wondering how common this is. Are people really good at taking what happened in the past and learning from it? What spells the difference between people who actually are behaving like Tom taking a bad experience and saying, I'm actually going to use it and people who just sort of stay stuck in what that bad experience was and think about it over and over again? So I think the thing that really characterizes it is less about necessarily what kind of person you are,

but rather the way that you're experiencing these thoughts. So there's something called rumination, which actually comes literally from bovine digestion, the idea of how cows vomit back up things, chew them over, swallow them back down, and so on and so forth. And in terms of our thoughts, it's actually this idea of the same kind of process that rumination is having thoughts sort of spring unwanted to mind and we're chewing them over without actually getting anything new out of them. They're just repeatedly, intrusively becoming sort of part of our mental landscape. And what we found is that people who have roominative regrets, so that they're both having this regret, but also having it be something that's intrusive and repeated

tend to be people who are also experiencing the most negative outcomes. So, are more likely to have clinical depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, things like that. There are some regrets you can learn from, like Tom's story about trying out for the school play, but other regrets feel harder to overcome. I asked Amy some of her about this, and I played her the story from Catherine Wiginton Green, a listener from Washington, D.C. played her the story from Catherine Wiginton Green, a listener from Washington DC. My main regret, what popped into my mind when I heard this on the podcast, was regretting not stopping and seeing my estranged father. He'd been estranged for our family for quite a while, and I had not seen him or spoken

with him in a very long time, his choice. I was driving along Barcwade Parkway,way with my boyfriend at the time, who was now my husband. As we were driving up Barcree Parkway, I looked to my right and saw him and the woman he married walking arm in arm. I saw him and I told my husband to pull over immediately without thinking. When we stopped the car, I started to unbuckle my seatbelt. And then I stopped and paused for a moment and realized, I had no idea what I was going to do or what I was going to say.

So I chickened out and buckled my seatbelt back and told my husband to keep driving. And then I burst into tears. And I realized that that was probably the last time I was in the scene here, and that was my only chance to talk to him again. So I still regret that. There's something really point in about that story, Amy, because in this case, it doesn't sound as if the regret has the potential for learning.

She says that she feels that the door was closed in terms of her ability to reconnect with her father, and she comes back to this memory over and over again, and just remembers it as an opportunity that was lost. Yeah, certainly in terms of the specific incidents that we regret, they do seem to be most likely things where we had this opportunity in the moment, but it's not something that we can go back and fix. Because obviously, if we could just magically turn back and fix something, then most people would do that

rather than continue to regret it. What I might say is that I would imagine that one of the reasons that this does wrinkle for this woman is that it's about something that's important to her that it's about something that's important to her, it's about her family. And that perhaps this is something that she can carry forward in terms of how she handles other relationships going forward. So I've heard people say that there are anecdotal reports that the things that people really

regret are the things that they didn't do rather than the things that they did do. Is that just anecdotal? Is that not actually true that people regret acts of omission more than acts of commission? I would say there's some evidence for that. So one of the more famous studies on this thought about this in terms of something that happens over time. And what those researchers argued is that we regret things we did a lot more in the moment. So if you say something really stupid in a job interview, you're going to walk out and have that hand to the forehead feeling of,

oh, why did I say that? That was such a terrible thing to have said in that moment. But in the long run, we tend to have things that are kind of incomplete goals stick around in our memory as kind of a mental to-do list, basically. And that as a result, our inactions wind up getting kind of added to that mental to-do list. So this may be something where, if you ask me, you know, what could you have done instead of going to grad school? I have this whole range of possibilities. I could have been a doctor. I could have been a writer. I could have backpacked around Europe and found my passion.

And if you ask me, what are the things that you did yesterday that you could undo? I have a finite set of things I actually did in my life. And so over time, it may be that when we're trying to undo something bad that's happened to us, it's easy to start imagining all of the things we might have done in the past because we have a lot more of those available to us than the things we actually did. There are times when we don't take responsibility for our actions, but at other times, we hold ourselves accountable for things

that are outside our control. James Cooper of Pittsburgh shared one of those stories for us. My biggest regret is not listening to my father tell me about the mundane things that happened to him during the day. And instead just immediately asking for my mom when I called the house,

and maybe when I talked to him, I could have picked up on some other signs too, and could have maybe prevented his suicide. You know, when I heard James's story, Amy, I wondered whether, you know, if he had spoken to his father more, would he have actually picked up on his father's mental health? And even if he had noticed, could he have actually stopped his father from committing suicide?

And it seemed to me that in this case, James might have been taking on more responsibility than was actually warranted. I mean, it's understandable, certainly at an emotional level, but you've done some research looking at how sometimes when it comes to regret, we take on more responsibility than we should. Yeah, I think I would say exactly that. I think that this is a case of probably imagining that there's more that could have happened differently. And it's certainly the case as well that I think people often tend to focus a lot on their own actions about negative

events. And it's probably important to think about the fact that you're just one agent in a much bigger framework, that his father had other friends, hopefully had doctors, had his mother, and that it's not just on James to have recognized these symptoms, but that there were lots of other pieces that could have played out differently, not just his own actions, but a broader set of things that could have changed. Is there a way for people to look at their regrets and say, this is the kind of regret that is actually useful and productive, and this is the kind of regret that is actually better set aside?

So, yeah, I would say that we know that people tend to generate these what-if thoughts as a way of trying to understand their experiences and as a way of trying to bring control to things that feel uncontrollable. We don't like the idea that bad things happen with no reason and without the ability to predict them. And in the case of regret, I think it can be that in James's case, for instance, not wanting to think about this tremendous loss as something that wasn't predictable and wasn't controllable, that it's I think very reassuring sometimes to try to come up with an explanation of there's a way that this could have been prevented, it could have been changed, and it feels less random and less senseless in that way.

You know, I'm fascinated by what you just said because essentially what you're saying is that the fear or the pain of having a world that seems, you know, without meaning or is unexplainable or unpredictable, that pain of that might actually be greater than the pain of taking on regrets for things that you actually maybe don't have responsibility for and experiencing personal anguish

about it, that's a fascinating idea. Yeah, there's been research that says one of the ways that people can get a sense of control over their circumstances is by having these thoughts about what might have been. The dark side of that, along with personal regret, is there is also work where things like victim blaming can actually come out of these thoughts about what might have been. So if you think about a woman who attended a party and drank a drink that had been drugged

and then was sexually assaulted. It's very easy to think about that one moment of she took this drink and if she had been more careful, then this assault might not have happened to her and that that sort of gives us a sense of control rather than the much more complicated thing to think about undoing of, well, how could we have prevented this person who gave her this drink and who committed this crime from doing it? So, yeah, these thoughts about what might have been

help give us a causal structure to our world, but sometimes they're not necessarily the correct or the most useful ways of thinking about causality. When we come back, a story of regret and karma. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Back with Amy Somerville, she's a psychologist in head of the regret lab at Miami University of Ohio. Amy, let's listen to another story. This one comes from Tanya Stock of Farmington, New Mexico. I'm going to play the story in two parts because I think it reveals two different sides of regret. One of my biggest regrets comes from something I did in the fifth grade,

20 or more years ago. I remember making fun of this little girl who was a bit overweight in me and another girl just teased her relentlessly. And I think about some of the things that I said to her and some of the ways that I treated her. And I just regret how cruel I was as a child. And now that I'm older and I work in a field where I see the effects of bullying and meanness does to children. I am so full of regret in that and if I could ever find her again or talk to her again because I've moved to three or four different places at this point in my life and have no idea where she is or if it even affected her, I regret

the way that I treated her and I believe that I was so cruel. Amy, I want to talk about the role of guilt in regret. They seem closely tied these two emotions, but I don't think they're identical. Tom Bonsain from Arlington, Virginia, regretted that he didn't get the lead in his school play, but there was no guilt involved. Tanya, on the other hand, feels terrible about what she did. When you hear Tanya's story, are you hearing guilt or are you hearing regret? So listening to Tanya's story, I would say I hear both guilt and regret, and both regret and guilt are emotions that are based on a form of comparison. So regret, I'm comparing what really happened to some imagined alternative.

And some of the time, that's all we feel, right? I just imagined that something could have been better. Guilt involves an additional comparison to what has been called our personal standards rules and goals. So what are the things that we aspire to in our behavior? And when we make a comparison that says, what we really did, fall short of those personal standards, rules, or goals for ourselves, then we're likely to feel guilt.

I want you to listen to the second part of Tanya's story. She told us that she fully realized what she had done to this other little kid, only when events in her own life took a turn. I think karma came and got me because while I was a petite little kid as I got older and through some injuries, I became quite overweight myself and heard the comments that were said about me or how I became invisible and like people didn't think that my feelings mattered. The heaviest I ever was was 330 pounds and I have worked hard and have surgery and have lost. Quite a bit of weight, I'm just about 195 now, but I still see myself and still have the self-confidence of a 330 pound woman. I know how it feels and I regret making anyone else ever feel that way. When you listen to Tanya's story Amy, I'm wondering, do you hear sort of someone saying, I really don't like the way the world is treated me or do you hear someone saying,

I realize the world is treated me really badly and that's opened my eyes to the way that I might have treated other people in the past. It sounds like in Tanya's case, she's really developed a different understanding of the world and used that to understand how her behavior may have affected other people rather than necessarily being a particularly focused on feeling that she's been treated badly. And I think that again, regret is based on this idea that we personally could have done something differently. And so in some ways, it's obviously a self-focused emotion. It's about what we should have done, but I think it can also be a fairly selfless emotion

and be about how we relate to the people in the world around us, what responsibility do we have towards our fellow humans? One of the things that I really hear Tanya talking about is I wish that I could find this person and tell her about how I now regret what I did to her when we were children. And I think one of the things as well that's interesting about this whole episode is that you have listeners calling in to tell the whole world, millions of people who might listen to this podcast about their very personal, very private regrets. You know, psychologists have talked for a long time about something called the fundamental

attribution era, which is how much do we believe actions of either ourselves or others are caused by things that are intrinsic to us, things that are part of our personalities, who we are, versus things that are shaped by the context, by the situation in which we find ourselves. When someone like Tanya looks back as an adult at her behavior as a child, do you think the fundamental attribution at her plays a role in some ways leading us to believe that we are responsible for things that maybe we were not responsible for, that maybe really the context was driving our actions and behavior way back when. Yeah, absolutely.

and behavioral way back where? Yeah, absolutely. Again, I think regret is based on this sense of personal responsibility. And certainly in Western cultures, there's very much this belief that individuals are responsible for their own actions, we're responsible for our own destinies. And I think that can lead individuals to think more about how a given actor, including themselves or including another person played a role, and a lot less attention to the whole context.

So in Tanya's story, I believe she started by talking about how there was another little girl that she was friends with who joined with her in the bullying. And I think it may be easy to ignore the degree to which she was experiencing peer pressure. Right? There was probably a social context in which this bullying occurred, which doesn't forgive it or excuse it, but it's not necessarily just about who Otonia is as a person to have done this, but rather really a much more complicated net of things that were influencing her as well as who she was at that time. I want to talk about the idea of counterfactuals. A counterfactual of course is when we imagine that things could have turned out differently than they actually did.

As it turns out, I'm recovering right now from a sports injury and when I think about how I got hurt, the only thing I'm thinking about is what could I have done differently to prevent this injury from happening? Now most of the time when I play sports, I'm not asking myself why didn't I get hurt? So what do you think causes us to reach for certain counterfactuals at one point in time, but not for others? So we talk about counterfactuals as having two different directions. So things imagining how the world could have been better, we call upward counterfactuals and imagining how the world could have been worse, we call downward counterfactuals. And certainly in life, upward counterfactuals seem to predominate.

And one of the reasons that we seem to do this is that these upward counterfactuals are helping us learn. So if you think about getting into a car accident, if I say, you know, if only I hadn't been texting, then I might not have had the accident. That's identifying a particular cause of the accident. It was the texting and not my speed or the fact that it was raining or the way that the road was engineered and designed for traffic flow. And downward counterfactuals seem to serve a different function, which is that they make

us feel better about the things that might have happened. And so my collaborator, Soyan Rim, and I have found that when people are focused on things from which they have a little bit of distance, whether that's things that have happened more distantly in time, or things that have happened to other people versus to themself, we're able to get into this mindset of thinking about what are the goals that we have, and what are the ways that we can use this negative event to self-improve. But for things that feel a little bit closer to us, so again, happening to us personally

rather than to somebody else, those things we seem to be often somewhat more focused on feeling better about. And so with the example of your injury, it may be the case that it's helpful to think about how things could have turned out much worse than they did. That, you know, your back at work, hopefully you didn't need a lot of medical intervention or surgery, you know, and those would have been things that would have been much, much

worse than walking away with just maybe a sprain or a strain. So I'm reminded of that great study that Tom Gilevich did many years ago at the Barcelona Olympics, where he took photographs of the people years ago at the Barcelona Olympics, where he took photographs of the people who were on the the medal stand. And he found, of course, that the silver medalists tend to make these upward kind of factuals, and they tend to look a little less happy because they wish they had one goal. Whereas the bronze medalists tend to make downward kind of factuals. They imagine all the other people who didn't win any medals at all, and find themselves relieved that they find themselves in the metals podium in the first place

And this is fascinating because how this happens how we choose to make the upward counterfactual or the downward kind of factual This is largely happening unconsciously and yet this unconscious choice has an enormous effect on whether we feel happy afterwards Yeah, and one of the things that shapes particularly the metal example is how easy is it to imagine this alternative happening. So often for a silver metalist, it's much, much easier to imagine how close they were to getting gold. Whereas for a bronze metalist, the thing that's easiest to imagine is, bronze medalist, the thing that's easiest to imagine is, yeah, not being on the medal stand at all, because those are things that are actually closer. Another one of my favorite studies about counterfactuals is that if you think about a grade distribution where the cutoff to get an A is to get a 90% or above, students who get an 89 in a course

wind up being less satisfied than the students who got an 87. Both of them have a B plus, but the 89s, it's so easy to just imagine how did you get just that one more point, whereas for the 87s, they tend to feel lucky that they wound up where they are and aren't imagining how they might have gotten the aiminess instead. I understand you got married about a year ago and you applied some of your own research on regret when it came to choosing a wedding dress. I did. So I actually wasn't applying my own research. I applied work by Shineyanger on the phenomenon of choice overload, as well as work by Barry Schwartz and colleagues about the idea of maximizing versus satisfying as strategies for decisions, maximizing being the idea that you want to pick the best of all possible alternatives and satisfying being the idea that you're

going to pick something that meets all of your standards, but may or may not be the absolute best. So when I was wedding dress shopping, I went to a couple of stores. I tried on five or 10 dresses at each one, and I found a dress that I absolutely loved and was in my price range. And I realized that what the research told me was I would never be happier than I was at that moment.

That if I kept dress shopping, I was going to wind up feeling overwhelmed. I could find a hundred different lace sheaths with a V-neck in ivory. And I would wind up feeling confused about what are the differences between these and that the very act of trying to get the absolute best would mean that I could never really be sure if I had done it. Whereas if I adopted a satisfying strategy, I could be sure I'm in a dress that

looks beautiful on me and is in my price range and I should just buy it and be done. And so that's how I chose my wedding dress. So for all your kids who think that research has no benefit in people's lives, that's a great example. Amy Somerville is a psychology professor at Miami University of Ohio. She runs the regret lab where she studies when and why people think about what might have been. Amy, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Our team includes Lucy Perkins, Raina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt, Maggie Penman, Parth Shah, and Renee Clarre. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Our unsung heroes this week are the program directors at NPR Member Stations

around the country. I just spoke to them at a meeting in Washington. Many of them are exploring the possibility of putting hidden brain on the air as a radio show starting in October. If you start to hear hidden brain on the air as a radio show starting in October. If you start to hear hidden brain on the radio, you know you have your local stations program director to thank. One last thing before we go, we're working on an episode about personality tests. Have you ever taken the true colors, the Myers-Briggs, or the Robin Hood morality test? Have you ever used a personality quiz to decide something important

where to work or whom to date? If you were asked to take the test at work, have managers used it to decide something important about your career? We're looking for stories that range from the silly to the serious and we'd love to hear from you.