What Is the Purpose of Regret? The Psychology Behind It

Regret is not a malfunction. I spent most of my adult life treating it like one (something to medicate, reframe, or outrun with a tattoo that said the opposite), and I was wrong about the purpose of regret in a way that took me over a decade to notice, let alone admit.

Here is the confession, stated plainly: I used to believe that a well-lived life produced less regret over time, that emotional maturity looked like an increasingly clean rearview mirror. I have interviewed dozens of people about the decisions that still keep them up at night, founders who sold too early, people who didn’t call their father back, a friend who turned down a scholarship in 2009 to stay near a boyfriend she doesn’t remember the last name of. I used to hear those stories and think: this is what unresolved looks like. Get resolved. I was diagnosing a working system as broken.

What Is the Actual Purpose of Regret?

Regret exists to correct behavior while correction is still possible. It is not a verdict on the past, it is a lever pointed at the future. Neal Roese, who has spent much of his career at Northwestern studying counterfactual thinking, found something that reframed the entire question for me: regret intensifies almost exactly in proportion to how much opportunity still exists to act on it. He and Amy Summerville ran a meta-analysis of eleven separate ranking studies, pooling data from 3,041 participants, and found the six domains people regret most, in order, are education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Every one of them a domain where a next move is usually still available (Roese & Summerville, 2005, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin). That’s the opportunity principle: regret isn’t loudest where the damage is worst, it’s loudest where the door is still open.

This is not a marginal emotion doing marginal work. Regret is one of the most frequently named emotions in ordinary daily speech, running second only to love in conversational frequency, a finding Roese and Summerville lead with when they explain why the emotion is worth studying at all. An emotion that common, that persistent, and that unpleasant is either a very expensive bug or a feature.

The neuroscience points at feature. In a 2004 study published in Science, Nathalie Camille and colleagues gave a gambling task to patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex and to healthy controls. The controls felt regret when they saw the outcome of the road not taken, and then adjusted their next choice to avoid feeling it again. The lesion patients reported disappointment but not regret, and critically, they failed to anticipate it, so they never made the adjustment (Camille et al., 2004, Science). Remove regret from a decision-maker and you do not get a serene decision-maker. You get one who stops learning.

I had it backwards. I thought regret was supposed to fade as a sign of healing. It turns out regret is supposed to fade only once the option genuinely closes, and it’s supposed to stay loud, uncomfortably loud, for as long as you could still do something about it.

Why Do People Say They Have No Regrets?

Because “no regrets” is usually a description of a story someone has decided to stop revising, not an accurate account of their internal state. In Roese’s nationally representative work, having zero regrets turns out to be statistically unusual rather than aspirational.

I used to admire that phrase. I’ve since watched enough people say it right before describing, in detail and with real pain, the exact thing they claim not to regret. Regret is not the emotion of a bad decision; it is the emotion of an open door. It gets louder exactly when something can still be done, and goes quiet once the door shuts. People who claim zero regrets aren’t unusually well-adjusted. They’re usually people who’ve stopped believing anything is still actionable, which is its own kind of quiet.

The cultural version of “no regrets”, Édith Piaf’s non, je ne regrette rien, the YOLO tattoo era, the Stoic-flavored internet advice to simply not look backward. Treats regret as pure waste, a tax on happiness with no offsetting return. This is the counterargument worth taking seriously, because it’s not stupid: rumination is real, it does correlate with depression, and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s decades of work established that a ruminative response style predicts the onset and duration of depressive episodes rather than merely accompanying them (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco & Lyubomirsky, 2008, Perspectives on Psychological Science). Plenty of people do get stuck replaying decisions in a loop that produces no behavior change at all.

But “regret can curdle into rumination” is not the same claim as “regret has no function,” and the data don’t support the stronger claim. In a 2021 review published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers examining the antecedents and appraisals of regret describe its central behavioral function as modifying either the outcome of a decision, when that’s still possible, or the type of choice made next time, when it isn’t (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021). That’s not decoration. That’s a mechanism with a job. Rumination is what regret degrades into when the signal is received and no decision follows. The problem in that case isn’t the alarm. It’s the person standing in the hallway listening to it.

Do People Regret Actions or Inactions More?

Over a lifetime, inactions, by a wide margin. In the short term people regret the things they did, but stretch the window out and the pattern reverses: regrets of omission outnumber regrets of commission by roughly three to one in the largest survey ever conducted on the question.

Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec ran the study that established the reversal back in 1994. In the near term, the sting of a bad action dominates, because you can point at it, name it, and assign yourself blame with precision. Extend the timeline and inaction becomes the dominant, longer-lasting regret (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994). That finding held up long enough to matter, and it also held up to scrutiny: a 2023 replication published in Collabra: Psychology reran the study nearly thirty years later and found the same reversal, plus new evidence about how much responsibility people assign themselves depending on which path they took (Collabra: Psychology, 2023).

I didn’t understand, for years, why the choices I acted on and lived with badly stopped hurting faster than the choices I never made. I thought I was just getting used to my mistakes. What was actually happening is that the mistakes I could point to and explain got processed and closed, while the paths I never walked kept generating new, unfalsifiable versions of how good they might have been. An action has one outcome and it is already known. An inaction has infinite outcomes and none of them can be checked. You cannot close a file that has no ending.

Daniel Pink’s World Regret Survey makes the same point at a scale I didn’t expect. He and his team collected more than sixteen thousand regrets from over a hundred countries, and one pattern showed up again and again: regrets of omission, the things people didn’t do, outnumbered regrets of commission by roughly three to one (World Regret Survey). That ratio is the whole confession in one number. I built years of decision-making advice around minimizing bad actions, when the actual liability sitting in most people’s chests was the actions never taken.

Pink’s sorting of those sixteen thousand entries is worth sitting with too. He found they collapse into four categories: foundation regrets (I didn’t do the boring maintenance work), boldness regrets (I didn’t take the risk), moral regrets (I knew better and did it anyway), and connection regrets (I let the relationship drift and never reached back). Three of those four are omissions. The single most common shape of human regret is not a wrong move. It is a move never made.

What Do People Regret Most in Life?

Education, career, and romance, in that order. In Roese and Summerville’s pooled data, education was the single most-regretted domain at roughly a third of all regrets reported, with career second and romance third.

The reason education tops the list is not that schooling matters more than love. It’s that education is the most reopenable domain in a modern life. You can go back. There are night programs and second degrees and certificates, and the door stays visibly ajar for decades, which is exactly the condition under which the opportunity principle predicts regret will stay loud. Roese and Summerville also found that education regrets clustered among people with less formal education, the group for whom the missing option is most salient and still most available.

The picture shifts slightly when you sample the general population rather than pooling lab studies. Morrison and Roese later surveyed a nationally representative American sample by telephone and found romance at the top, at roughly one in five regrets, with family and education close behind (Morrison & Roese, 2011, Social Psychological and Personality Science). Same principle, different distribution: what people regret tracks what they still believe is fixable, and that varies with who you ask and what their life currently permits.

Here is the uncomfortable implication. Your personal regret ranking is not a list of your worst decisions. It is a map of the doors you still think are open. Read it that way and it stops being an indictment and starts being an inventory.

Is Regret the Same as Guilt?

No. Guilt is about who you harmed, regret is about what you could have chosen differently, and collapsing the two is what made me distrust the emotion in the first place.

Guilt keeps its eyes on another person. Regret keeps its eyes on the branch point, the fork, the version of you that picked B instead of A. The experimental work separating them turns on interpersonal harm: strip the harm to another person out of a scenario and the guilt drops away while the regret stays, which is the cleanest demonstration that they are two emotions and not one emotion with two names. The Frontiers review reaches the same separation from the appraisal side, treating regret as agency-focused and self-referential rather than other-referential (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021).

I used to lump them together because they feel adjacent, and I treated both as things to manage down. But you manage guilt by making amends to someone else. Regret doesn’t have anyone else in the room. It has only you, the option you took, and the option that’s still sitting there, theoretically available, generating noise until you either take it or the window closes for good. Confusing them meant I was applying guilt’s solution (apologize, move on, minimize), to a signal that was actually asking for a decision, not an apology.

How Do You Know If a Regret Is Worth Acting On?

Ask one question: is the door still open? A regret pointed at a choice that remains available is a live instruction to act on it; a regret pointed at a permanently closed option is grief, and grief needs a different response than a decision does.

What finally convinced me was not a single study. It was watching the same regret get reported by people twenty years apart, worded almost identically, about the exact same category of decision. Pattern recognition over enough individual conversations that the pattern stopped looking like coincidence and started looking like a design feature. Someone in their thirties telling me they wish they’d majored in something else, someone in their sixties telling me the same thing about a decision forty years old, both using the phrase “I still think about it” like it was new.

That repetition is what the opportunity principle predicts and what “no regrets” can’t explain. If regret were just leftover pain with no function, it would fade evenly, like a bruise. It doesn’t. It fades unevenly, in exact correspondence with whether the thing is still fixable, which is a strange property for an emotion to have unless the emotion is doing something on purpose.

The practical test I now run has three steps and takes about a minute. Name the specific choice, not the vague feeling: not “I regret my twenties” but “I regret not applying to that program in 2014.” Check whether an equivalent version of that choice exists today. If it does, the regret is a to-do item wearing an emotional costume. If it doesn’t, say so out loud, because the door does not close on its own, you have to close it, and an unclosed door on an unavailable option is exactly the condition that turns regret into rumination.

I stopped trying to feel less regret and started asking, every time it showed up, whether the door it was pointing at was actually still open. Most of the time it was, which was the uncomfortable part, not that regret was irrational, but that it had been right the entire time and I’d spent years arguing with a smoke detector instead of checking for the fire.

How Should You Deal With Regret Going Forward?

Route it rather than reduce it. The goal is not fewer regrets, it’s faster sorting between the ones that point at an available choice and the ones that point at a closed door, because those two require opposite responses and most advice treats them as the same thing.

I think the next decade of research moves in that direction too, away from “how do we reduce regret” and toward “how do we route it correctly”, distinguishing, faster and more precisely, which regrets are still live wires pointed at an available choice and which have gone dead because the option is actually gone. Practitioners who work with decision-making, whether in therapy rooms or executive coaching or product design, will stop treating regret as an outcome to minimize and start treating it as a diagnostic to read.

If the three-to-one omission ratio is right, and two independent bodies of evidence thirty years apart say it is, then the dominant error in human decision-making is not recklessness. It’s abstention. Most of us are optimizing against the wrong failure mode, carefully avoiding the regrets we’ll have forgotten in five years while quietly accumulating the ones we’ll still be describing at seventy. The people who get good at that distinction early, is this door open or closed, are going to make noticeably fewer of the omission regrets that make up most of what the rest of us are carrying.