The Road Not Taken

When engaging in personal micro counterfactuals, its easy to forget that every act a person does, every choice, error, commission, or omission, has an impact of some sort.

And every significant such choice, error, commission, or omission has long term impacts.  Many life long.

The closer a person is to a fork in the road, the easier it is to backtrack down the road and take the other fork.  At some point, however, you are far enough down that road that going back isn't practical, or at some point even possible.

And at those point, all the impacts of that chosen trip are irrevocable to a certain degree.  People who have benefited or suffered as a result of that choice, did so as a result of that choice.  When people imagine the alternative counterfactual, that's often forgotten. Oh, the negative consequences are of course imagined as avoided.  The positive ones are imagined as retained. And that's the weakness of all such scenarios.

Which is why perhaps people should not engage in them.



At least not too much.

Or perhaps too wistfully retrospectively.

Gilovich, Medvec, and Kahneman (1998) have shown that real-life regrets for actions and inactions correspond to different emotional states. When people regret something they have done they experience painful “hot” emotions such as disgust or guilt, whereas when the regret is about a failure to act they rather experience wistful emotions. In four questionnaire studies, we have tested the hypothesis that regrettable actions elicit a particular subcategory of these hot emotions: the self-conscious emotions (i.e., guilt, shame, embarrassment, remorse, and anger toward oneself). These studies used different methodologies and all converged to show that self-conscious emotions were the only hot emotions to be systematically greater for action regrets than for inaction regrets. A similar pattern was observed for judgments of responsibility and morality. We emphasize the theoretical and methodological implications of these results in the discussion.

 From the Journal of Social Psychology.

Or not.