A Sociology of Regret

This paper aims to present regret, an emotion to which sociologists so far have paid little attention, as having great sociological significance. First, it reviews recent research in social psychology and economics which cast anticipated regret as playing a major role in human decision-making. Second, it suggests a regret-based interpretation of the sunk-cost fallacy, arguing that anticipated regret is responsible for both commitment to a chosen life-course and for sudden changes in it. Such an interpretation, however, points to the need of a specifically sociological perspective on regret, calling attention to the cultural and institutional framings of regret-arousing events. The paper further argues that secular changes in the types of regret imposed on individuals are paralleled by the spread of various forms of coping with it. The paper ends with discussing the general implications of regret as a phenomenon for sociological understanding of rationality and human action.