Thank you, Hitendra. Thanks for having me.

Well, I met my wife in law school, which is the main thing that I got out of the whole experience. As you said, when you look back on your life, there are some things that you wish you had done. Some things you wish you hadn't done. Some things you wish you had done differently. I think that it is an interesting kind of metaphysical puzzle, that if I had my life to live over again, would I have gone to law school? Probably not. But, if the only way I can meet my wife was to go to law school, I would totally do it again.

It was largely because I had regrets of my own. I think that's one big part of it. The second big part of it was that I was at a point in my life where, to my surprise, I had room to look backward. I went in a lot of work situations from being the youngest person in the room to no longer being the youngest person in the room. And, I had markers in my own family life, for instance, a daughter graduating from university that made me to stop and take stock and look back and say, "Whoa, some time has passed," and like any human being, when I look backward, there were things that I wish I had done. There were things I wish I hadn't done. There were things I wish I had done differently. I thought that was an interesting emotion. I was actually working on a book about something entirely different. But when I began talking to people about this experience that I had, I found that people really leaned in and reacted in a way that was surprising. And so, I decided to take this on. There is an old adage from the academic world, "All research is me search". So at some level, that is part of what was going on here.

Sure. For this book, to try to crack the code on this emotion, I had 3 different approaches. I wasn't sure exactly what each of them was going to yield. My hunch was that if I tried all 3, something would work and that ended up being the case. I was surprised a little bit about how things turned out.

One path was to look at the existing academic research on this emotion of regret. This is research done over the last 60 years or so, a lot of it in social psychology, some of it in developmental psychology, some of it in cognitive science, some of it in neuroscience. What does half a century of academic research tell us about this emotion? That's one part of it.

The second thing that I did is, I did a very large public opinion survey of the US population. I'm very proud of this piece of research. It didn't yield nearly as much as I thought, but I thought the project itself was well done. We put together a very large sample. I worked with a data analytics company, who put together panels so that we had random samples, and we ended up surveying 4,489 Americans and tried to do the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted. That yielded some insights, although not nearly as many as I had hoped.

Finally, last but not least, I also did a qualitative piece of research, which is called "The World Regret Survey", where I simply invited people around the world to submit one of their big regrets. To date, we have a database of over 24,000 regrets from people in 109 countries.

We have got a lot of stuff. It's a lot of material. That's the punch line in all of this.

Absolutely. Each of those 24,000 regrets is a kind of a super concentrated mini autobiography. Moving is a good word for it. They don't bring you down. They don't necessarily bring you up, but they touch you in ways that other kinds of material does not.

I think that is the conclusion that I came to. I think what you're making is in some ways two different points that are related. One of them is, are there attributes of the human condition that are universal that transcend the typical superficial things that we tend to focus on like nationality, gender, race? What I found, both in the qualitative survey and in the quantitative survey, is that there were. I feel there were some pretty significant universals. There were some differences demographically, but not nearly as much as I thought. In fact, going back to that quantitative survey, the reason that I did such a large sample was so that I could oversample in certain subgroups and draw conclusions about African American regrets different from white Americans, regrets different from Asian American regrets different from women. And I didn't find that much, as I said before.

Therefore, one part is universal. But the second part is like, what is universal? What are the universals? And I do think that there is a universal kind of generous view of the human condition. Our desire for goodness and love. There has been a debate in philosophy for a long time as to what is the core of human nature? Is it red in tooth and claw? Is it treacherous, or is it generous and kind and noble? Obviously, it's both. It's a mix. But I actually tilt a little bit more toward the idea that our fundamental nature is good.

Exactly. That's another way of thinking through who we are. As you summarized it very concisely, we have this idea that the actual self is who we look at in the mirror. The ideal self is in some ways who we aspire to be, and the ought self is who we think we should be. Those categories ended up being fairly consistent with what I found looking at these massive numbers of qualitative regrets, basically just 24,000 individual autobiographies, because what I found is that these regrets are grouped into 4 key categories. Those categories map pretty well to Higgins' notion, particularly of the ideal and the ought self.

I don't know. It's an interesting question. I actually am not certain. I can tell you what I saw with my own stuff. I'll give you an example. One category of regrets were moral regrets, which is basically if only I'd done the right thing. You were at a juncture in your life, you can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing. When people do the wrong thing, most of us regret it. Now, what constitutes the wrong thing? It is complicated, because we don't have that kind of universality. Let me give you an example.

If we go to moral foundations theory, this idea that there is a set of values that are pretty consistent across cultures, but that they're not necessarily shared by all. For instance, we generally think that if you harm somebody else in an unwarranted way, that's bad. Everybody agrees with that. But when it comes to things like duty, respect for authority, respect for purity, respect for sanctity, there is kind of a divide. A lot of people around the world regret bullying other people earlier in their life. I was surprised by the number of bullying regrets that we had. These are not people who are on the receiving end of the bullying, these are people who are on the delivery end of the bullying. I was blown away by how many people regretted that. That's something that pretty clearly is the wrong thing to do. You're harming someone in an unjustified way.

Now, here's where it gets more complicated. I had some people in the United States whose big regret was that they didn't serve in the military. Why didn't they serve in the military? Why do they regret that? Because they felt like it was their obligation as a citizen to do that. There are some people who say, "Well, that's not a regret." And my view on that is, you don't get to say that. These are people for whom the moral duty of honor and obligation are extremely important. This is just a long winded way of saying one of the 4 core regrets, the moral regrets are more complicated than some of the others.

I've seen a little bit of it, yes.

It does, because in a sense, what regret is, looking at that film before you're having the near-death experience. Regret is looking at that film at other points in your life. One of the things that happens is that when we look back, there are things that we regret. And in some ways, especially here in the United States, we have been sold a bill of goods that is a bad idea, that you should always be positive and never be negative. You should always look forward and never look back. There is a kind of an ideology, almost as cultish positivity, and that's a bad idea. It is not a recipe for a good life, and it runs against what science tells us.

Science tells us that regret is part of our cognitive machinery. It is there for a reason. It makes us feel bad. But if we treat it right, it can help us do better. That's the key. In my own view, I think especially here in the States, we are a little over-indexed on positive emotions. Positive emotions are great. We should have lots of them, but we shouldn't have only positive emotions. We should have some negative emotions, too, because negative emotions are adaptive. They are functional. They help us live, they help us survive. They help us improve.

One of the things that you see, particularly in the social psychology research, is that of all the negative emotions that we have, regret is the most common, and I think it's the most transformative. It is ubiquitous in the human experience, but it's also transformative if we treat it right. The problem is, we haven't been treating it right, a lot of us, when we feel that spirit of regret, we ignore it. We say, "Oh, no, forget about it. Never look backward, never I'll wait till my near-death experience before I watch the film." That's a bad idea.

What also happens sometimes when people look back is, since they don't know how to process those events, they don't know how to evaluate those, interrogate what happened to them, make sense of what happened to them, they feel bad. They get brought down by it. So they ruminate on their regrets. They wallow in their regrets. That's a bad idea too. What we want to do is, we want to confront our regrets, use them as information, as signals, as data. When we do that, we have once again evidence. If we treat our regrets properly, they can be transformative. I think about it from a business school perspective.

There is evidence that processing regret in a healthy way can make us better negotiators. It can help make us better strategists. It can help us avoid cognitive biases. It can help us make better decisions. It can help us become better problem solvers. We have this emotion that it is aversive, but it is transformative. We haven't been taught the ways to take that negative emotion and turn it into something positive.

Sure. What I did in the World Regret Survey is that I invited people around the world to submit a regret that they had. I asked only for their location, their geography, I asked their age, I asked their gender identity. But I gave people the option to include their email address if they wanted to be contacted for a follow up interview. A huge number of people did, way more than I ever expected. Abby was one of the people who I did a follow up interview with. She had this pretty interesting connection regret. She grew up in Arizona. Her grandparents were from Indiana. Her grandparents would come and visit her for several months in the summer. And she hated it as a kid. She thought her grandparents were annoying. She thought that they were busybodies, they were pestering her, they were asking her questions, and she really didn't like them being there. As a young adult, her grandparents passed away, and suddenly she said, "Oh, my God, I blew it. I didn't hear their stories. I didn't get a chance to know them. They led such interesting lives. And here I was, this petulant kid dismissing them. This is a big mistake." And so here's what she did. She looked backward and said, "If only I had treated my grandparents better, if only I had heard my grandparents' stories." She felt bad. Now the question is, what does she do with that bad feeling? She could say, "No, it doesn't matter. Always look forward. Not a problem." Bad idea.

She could say, "Oh my God, I'm the worst person in the world." But that itself is kind of indulgent, too, because believe me, you're not the only petulant kid who didn't like hanging out with their grandparents. Or she can say, "Wait a second, I'm feeling bad about something that occurred in the past, what is that signal telling me?" What the signal is telling me is that I actually value connection to family and it's also instructing me how to do different things for the rest of my life. So, she very systematically began collecting the stories of her own parents because she wanted to avoid that terrible feeling in the future.

This is a way that processing our regrets properly can help us make sense of our lives, and can help us do better. This is the paradox, not the paradise. This is what makes it complicated. My view, and I think the evidence is overwhelming in this, is that regret clarifies what we value and instructs us on how to live better. If you say to somebody, "I've got something that will clarify what you value and help you live better, people say, "Oh yeah, I'll take that." And I say, "Wait a second. But the thing is, it also makes you feel bad. It actually makes you feel bad." And you say, "Well, I'll just take the first part." And that's not the offer. The offer is, that this thing that actually makes you feel bad, because it makes you feel bad, it transforms the way you see the world and the way you live your life. We want clarity and instruction, but we don't want the negative feeling. But that is not the deal. This is the thing that makes regret difficult for people to wrap their minds around. That it is this thing that makes us feel bad, but if we treat it right, it helps us do better and it also helps us avoid future regrets.

Sure, but I will see you and raise you on your point, Hitendra. Those two worlds are not necessarily starkly divided. One of the big things that you see in behavior in general, but attitudes toward regret in particular, is this belief that our inner lives are somehow singular, exemplary, different from everybody else's, and when in fact they're actually pretty common. One of the things that brings people down with regret is that when they feel regret, and again, just to be very clear, regret makes you feel worse. When they feel regret, they say, "Oh my gosh, I must be the only one experiencing this." And you're not. It is one of the most common emotions that human beings have. We suffer from an egocentric, pluralistic ignorance, where we think somehow that we're woefully, massively different from everybody else, when in fact, we're not. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that when you actually explore this emotion that is part of our cognitive machinery, what it reveals are some universal attributes of the human condition. What do we want out of life? Who do we aspire to be? What constitutes a life well lived?

I think that guilt is a subset of regret. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Guilt is a moral regret. As I was saying before, you're at a point in your life where you had a choice to take the high road or the low road and you took the low road and now you feel bad about it. But here's the thing. Most regret is not guilt. That is actually really important. And the other categories that I found, I'll quickly go through them. I had the category of what I call foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are small decisions people make early in life that gather steam and cause big problems later in life. For example, I didn't exercise or eat right, and now I'm woefully out of shape and unhealthy. I spent too much and saved too little, and now I'm broke. These are small decisions that accumulate force and disrupt the stability of your life. Because again, a lot of this goes back to what constitutes a good life. And a good life has some stability. A good life is not precarious.

Second one, a very big category, way bigger than the moral regrets. Typically having nothing to do with guilt at all is what I call Boldness Regrets. Again, you're at a juncture. You can play it safe or you can take the chance. Overwhelmingly, when people do not take the chance, they regret it, not all the time, but most of the time. It doesn't really matter the domain of life that you are in. I got hundreds of people who regret not asking somebody out on a date 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 30 years ago. People who regret not traveling, not going on adventures, not starting a business, not speaking up. Boldness regrets are a very large category that basically said, "If only I'd taken the chance."

Finally, there are connection regrets, which are about love and relationships, but not only romantic love. A lot of the regrets about romantic love ended up revolving around essentially bad marriages. The big category of connection regrets was about relationships that were intact or should have been intact, but that came apart often very slowly. You want to reach out and you don't, because you think it's going to be awkward. You want to reach out and you don't, because you think the other side is not going to care and you end up drifting apart from friends, from family, from siblings, from people in your life who enrich it with love. Again, not only romantic love.

When we look at all of these kinds of regrets, what we see is that guilt is a subset of this very large category of regret. Most regrets are not guilt. Some are, but most regrets are not guilt.

I think there are several lessons in that tale that have come out of the research on regret. One of them is a very powerful lesson in general about regret that came out in both the qualitative research that I did. I think it's the biggest finding that came out of the quantitative research that I did. And it is very robust in the existing academic research. It is this.

Over time, we are far more likely to regret what we didn't do than what we did. Guilt is frequently something that we did. Guilt is usually because of an action. Not always, but often. But over time, we are much more likely to regret inaction over action. It's a very sturdy finding. The takeaway from that is, that we should have a bias for action. We should have a bias in many cases, not all, for doing something. Because, we often overstate the risk of what can go wrong if we do that. I think that's a lesson for that.

The second thing is that we do have another form of pluralistic ignorance. You see this with connection regrets all the time. You say to people, "Well, I had this friend and we sort of drifted apart, and it's been ten years since I talked to him. I want to reach out. But it's going to be really awkward and they're not going to care." And I say, "You don't think they're going to care?" "No, they're not going to care." Well, what if he reached out to you after ten years? Would you care? "Oh, my God, I would be so touched." And so we somehow think that our experience is different from everybody else's. I think that the idea of having a bias for action and also recognizing that the kinds of values and preferences that you have are likely more shared than you believe. We are gripped in a kind of egocentric bias. Every human being is different, unique, and wonderful in that way. And our experience is trying to make our way through this world singular in some way. That said, we have a lot in common. We are the same species. And even though there are differences in culture, in gender, in race, in sexual orientation, all those kinds of things, we are the same species. There is a lot of similarity among human beings around the world. There's a lot that is universal, and much that is universal is actually ennobling in many ways.

Yeah, well said. And those two things are compatible. That's the thing. We are also in the grip of this kind of either or thinking. Are you a unique individual or do you show some universal attributes and universal values? The answer is yes. Those two things are perfectly compatible. I do think that there is an element of the human condition that is less Newtonian and more quantum than we might want. You even see it in terms of some of the universals. For instance, I do think that much of the human condition is ennobling, but I think that some of it is not. If you ask the question, are human beings selfish or generous? The answer is yes. We are both selfish and generous. Those are both powerful attributes of the human condition, and they are in direct contradiction of each other in the same way that at the subatomic level, the cat is dead and alive simultaneously.

This is why we have social psychology. Again, they're both right. I mean, people do have traits. Let's be very clear about that. Some people are introverted, some people are extroverted. Some people are probably inherently more kind than others. There are traits. But, the whole field of social psychology is premised on the idea that if you want to understand who you are and how you behave, you have to look at context. You have to look at the situation. You have to look at the environment. Human beings are behaviors of a mix of who we are behaving in the context that we're in. You see it in history of good people doing horrible things because of the context that they were in, and in our egocentric bias, looking back at that, we say, "Oh my God, if I were alive during slavery in the United States, I would not have brook this for a moment." When in fact, you probably would have gone along because context drives our behavior more than we think.

There's no question about that. In social psychology, the big problem is known as the fundamental attribution error, where we when we try to explain people's behavior, we tend to be over-indexed on their personality.

Let me give you an example. I don't like to drive. I find driving extremely frustrating. When I drive, I'm a pretty unpleasant person, I swear a lot. I get frustrated easily, somewhat hotheaded. If you were to see me only in the context of driving, you would think that I was a total ass. But, if you were to see me in almost any other realm of life, you wouldn't think that. If you're only glimpse of me is when I'm behind the wheel, you think this guy is a horrible human being. But if you were to see me in any other realm of life, you would say, this guy's fine. So which one is the real me? I don't know, because we behave differently in different contexts. The nice me and the asshole-me are perfectly compatible. They inhabit the same physical and metaphysical space.

That's a great point and a great connection to some of the other things that we were talking about. This idea of being ambiverted is not my idea. It has been in the literature for 100 years. A lot of times we have this very binary way of thinking. You're either an introvert or an extrovert, when in fact, that trait exists on a spectrum. Down on one side, there are people who are extremely introverted and on the other side, people who are people who are extremely extroverted, and most of us are neither one nor the other. We exist at different spots along that spectrum and the spot that we inhabit often can be contextual.

Absolutely. I agree. The way that we make that backward looking decision is, we treat ourselves with compassion rather than contempt. We recognize that mistakes are part of the human condition. There is an argument to be made for talking about your regret, writing about your regret, because that's a form of sense making, and it is very important for us to take a step back and draw lessons from it.

At the same time, though, as you were talking about anticipating regret, what we should be doing is, we should be anticipating the kind of regrets that we know we're going to have. That's challenging because you can try to maximize every future oriented decision, which is a bad idea. What you should be doing is, you should be trying to reduce regrets that we know you're going to have because you're like everybody else, regrets about building a stable foundation, regrets about acting boldly, regrets about being moral and regrets about love. Anything else, what T-shirt did you wear today or what shirt should I wear tomorrow? Let me anticipate what I'm going to regret the most. Who cares? It doesn't matter. What am I going to have for lunch? What will I regret the most? Having a hamburger or macaroni and cheese for lunch? It doesn't matter.

A lot of the decisions that we make don't matter. That's something that people find very uncomfortable. A lot of the decisions that we make in our lives ultimately don't matter very much. But, there are a few that matter a lot. Since we don't have infinite computing capacity up here, what you want to do is, you want to actually do good enough on the minor, insignificant decisions, and really spend your time, your energy and your brainpower on the big decisions, which, again, ultimately go around to stability, growth, love and goodness.

Well, some of what you're talking about has some roots in research and personality psychology, where Dan McAdams at Northwestern has a theory of personality that's rooted in narrative. He says there are two reigning kinds of narratives. One is called a contamination narrative. The other is called a redemption narrative. A contamination narrative is when things go from good to bad, and a redemption narrative is one where things go from bad to good. The more that we can frame and see our lives as redemption narratives, so we take the bad in our lives and say, "How can I extract from that and make it good?" That seems to be a pattern for healthy living, and that's up to us. I don't think that life is determining our fates. I think that we are determining our fates, but I think that we determine our fates in part by making sense of our early experiences and using those as forms of redemption rather than forms of contamination.

I wish I had a better answer for you, Hitendra. I don't really know. I'm trying to figure out how do I want to spend, say, the next 30 years of my life? What do I want to do daily, and what kind of contribution can I make? And that's not an answer that I'm going to be able to figure out in a day or a week or a month. I don't know the answer to that. And that's okay. My hunch is that I'll end up discovering the answer through action.

Thanks for having me. I enjoyed our conversation. It really made me think.