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Through telephone surveys, written questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews, it was found that people's biggest regrets tend to involve things they have failed to do in their lives. This conflicts with research on counterfactual thinking that indicates that people regret unfortunate outcomes that stem from actions taken more than identical outcomes that result from actions foregone. These divergent findings were reconciled by demonstrating that people's regrets follow a systematic time course: Actions cause more pain in the short-term, but inactions are regretted more in the long run. Support for this contention was obtained in 2 scenario experiments that assessed people's beliefs about the short- and long-term regrets of others and in an experiment that asked Ss about their own regrets of action and inaction from 2 time periods. Several mechanisms that can account for this temporal pattern are discussed.

Regrets are like taxes: Nearly everyone must suffer them. In today's world in which people arguably exercise more choice than ever before in human history, it is exceedingly difficult to choose so consistently well that regret is avoided entirely. How then can people keep their regrets to a minimum? What courses of action or inaction should be avoided in order to ward off the experience of regret? In other words, what is it that people tend to regret most in their lives?

Until recently (Houston, Sherman, & Baker, 1991; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b; Kinnier & Metha, 1989; Landman, 1993; Metha, Kinnier, & McWhirter, 1989) little was known about the determinants of regret. Most research on the subject dealt not with the questions of when and why regret is experienced, but with how the anticipation of future regret affects current choices (Bell, 1981; Loomes &...