No regrets
OK, fewer regrets.
How can you make decisions you’re less likely to regret? Even if they go wrong?
Writing in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, professors at Cornell University reported on a study they did about decision making that offers great guidance on this.
They wanted to determine whether people feel worse about bad decisions they’ve made on their own, or bad decisions that they made after taking someone else’s advice. So, they set up a series of experiments designed to encourage subjects to make bad decisions.
Fortunately, the stakes weren’t very high, otherwise this could have taken a macabre turn very quickly.
Instead, they came up with tests involving 200 in-person participants and a series of online studies with at least 1,200 participants in each of four experiments.
In one example that had several iterations, they told participants that they could choose between two lotteries, but gave some of the participants advice that would lead them to pick lotteries with lower odds of winning or smaller prizes.
Across the board, participants who had chosen the less rewarding lottery after taking advice were more likely to express regret; those who had chosen the less attractive lottery on their own, without anyone telling them what to do, were more likely simply to chalk it up to bad luck.
“This effect could extend beyond small decisions … Our research highlights the importance of rejecting suggestions that go against our better judgments,” said co-author Sunita Sah. “People often assume that following someone else’s suggestion will shield them from responsibility or regret. But in reality, the opposite happens. You end up feeling worse when you ignored what you knew was the better choice.”
Interestingly, Sah and co-author Kaitlin Woolley suggested that they were surprised by the result.
“If you have another person in the decision process, you would think that’s going to help spread the responsibility,” said Woolley. “And yet not only do people not blame the adviser more, they’re blaming themselves more.”
So, does this mean just go with your gut, and don’t take advice? I think that would be a mistake. Instead, I think we can consider a three-part checklist.
First, can you articulate expertise?
Personally, I have a law degree and I’ve spent nearly 20 years as an author and writer. So, if I were faced with a legal question or a digital publishing question, I’d likely have a lot more expertise than if I were facing a question in another industry.
With the caveat that I’d want to be aware of my potential for overconfidence, I’d probably be more inclined to go with my gut.
Second, are you taking advice from someone you should be listening to?
Besides expertise or knowledge, there’s another key thing to consider, which is interest. In other words, does the person know more than you — and is he or she using that knowledge to assess your situation specifically?
A great trick to gain some insight here is to consider whether the adviser asks lots of questions, or simply jumps straight to the advice, probably making lots of assumptions.
Third, is the whole thing even worth your time?
I’m grateful for the way the Cornell researchers here framed their experiments because it’s a reminder that low-stakes decisions are rarely worth getting fired up about. That goes both for the time involved in considering them and for the degree of regret that you’d optimally feel if they went wrong, for whatever reason.
Overall, I’d say: Try to not feel bad about as many decisions. Unless, of course, your informed expertise tells you otherwise.
In that case, if you take my advice, you might come to regret it. Which means you should have gone with your intuition to begin with.
No wonder this is so hard.
7 other things worth knowing today
And they're off. Canadians will go to the polls on April 28 in what's shaping up to be a consequential and close election. After attending a church service Sunday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney — who has been in power for just nine days — visited Gov. Gen. Mary Simon to dissolve Parliament. Just a few months ago, polls suggested Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was destined for a majority government. But the political landscape has turned upside down since former prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation. (CBC)
A frail Pope Francis returned to the Vatican on Sunday after a five-week hospitalization for life-threatening double pneumonia, and he made a surprise stop at his favorite basilica on the way home before beginning two months of prescribed rest and recovery. The 88-year-old pope sat in the front passenger seat of his white Fiat 500L wearing nasal tubes to give him supplemental oxygen as he entered the Perugino gate of Vatican City, where his return brought relief after fears that his illness could be fatal or lead to another papal resignation. (AP)
A former U.S. Attorney, Jessica Aber, 43, was found dead at her home in Virginia Saturday. During her time as the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, she oversaw money laundering charges against two Russian nationals, a guilty plea from Siemens Energy over corporate espionage charges and murder convictions against a MS-13 member. (USA Today)
Elon Musk's social media platform X has suspended several accounts belonging to opposition figures in Turkey amid widespread civil unrest in the country. It's not the first time that X has restricted access to content in the country. In 2023, when Erdoğa was up for reelection, X restricted content "to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey," according to its global government affairs account. Musk himself said that "the choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets." (Politico)
Tesla owners are trading in cars at record rates amid Musk backlash. The data comes as Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply and vehicles and dealerships have faced vandalism over Musk’s role in the Trump administration. (The Washington Post)
Republicans on Capitol Hill are staring down a key three-week stretch in their effort to enact President Trump’s "big, beautiful bill” full of domestic policy priorities — including tax cuts. Republicans are attempting to move large pieces of Trump’s agenda through a process known as reconciliation, which bypasses the Senate filibuster but must meet specific criteria. (The Hill)
Is it safe to travel with your phone right now? Recent high-profile deportations began with phone searches at airports. What are your rights? The answer: it depends. (The Verge)
Thanks for reading. Photo by @felipepelaquim on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
A lot of times, you won’t know whether the decisions you make are the right ones for several months. And really, a failure at one thing will just lead you down a different path, so do you really ever lose? I have made many decisions I regret, but then if I hadn’t made them, I would not be the person I am today, so were they wrong decisions?
Not looking forward to a month full of political advertising but then at least we should be done with it for a while. You would think that political parties and other groups would know by now that attack ads and negative ads don’t do anything but annoy the people subjected to seeing them. Stop saying how terrible the other guy is and tell me what you are going to do that is different.
As usual an interesting article. What comes to mind is the old adage, "in a multitude of counselors there is safety". In high school I entered into the Science Fair. My experiment was a failure and I was bummed. My science teacher told me I shouldn't be disappointed because now I knew and everyone who visited my booth knew that this approach doesn't work. Eliminating wrong approaches is a good thing because we are now closer to the right approach. I think the key to this "No regrets" question is to be as circumspect as humanly possible. If after circumspection you still make the wrong choice you can feel OK that you did your best to get all the facts prior to making what ended up as the wrong choice.