JOURNAL OF CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY, I7(1), 19-24 Copyright O 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Regret Regulation: Disentangling Self-Reproach From Learning J. Jeffrey Inman University of Pittsburgh This article begins with several testable propositions inspired by Zeelenberg and Pieters (this issue). I argue that a critical skill for decision makers is to decouple the aspect of regret that leads to self-reproach from that aspect that can be used to learn from the outcome and improve future decision making. Results of an illustrative study are presented and discussed. Two other useful strategies are to match the decision effort to the decision's importance and to break big decisions into smaller ones. I close with a call for research examining regret as a self-control mechanism. When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regre@lly upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. Alexander Graham Bell Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh. Henry David Thoreau Given regret's primacy among negative emotions (e.g., Saffrey & Roese, 2006), the lion's share of regret research is oddly relatively recent, as shown in Zeelen- berg and Pieters's Figure 1 (2007). A Google search on the word regret yields 49.8 million hits, and Amazon lists 372 books with regret in the title, many of which are of the self-help variety (e.g., Beazley, 2004; Roese, 2005). Thus, there appears to be substantial interest in dealing with regret. As illustrated by the opening quotation, regret can serve an adaptive role if it helps us to learn from our mistakes, but also a maladaptive role if it causes us to focus on the past. The article by Zeelenberg and Pieters in this issue is a welcome step toward consolidating the insights gleaned from the body of regret research by offering some propositions regarding steps that a decision maker might take to regulate his or her regret. In this com- ment, I focus on what struck me as the most promising of the propositions articulated in Zeelenberg and Pieters (2007), then discuss a few additional prospective research directions. Correspondence should be addressed to J. Jeffrey Inman, University of Pittsburgh. E-mail: jinman@katz.pitt.edu The authors do a commendable job of synthesizing the main findings in the regret literature. They then pose nine propositions. While Proposition 2 is somewhat tautological and Propositions 3 and 4 are largely noncontroversial, the others offer interesting directions for research. Probably the greatest benefit to me from reading the article is that it stimu- lated my thinking about regret and directions that might be pursued to increase our understanding of this important con- struct. For example, re-reading Janis and Mann's (1977) four conditions for regret brought some prospective regret regula- tion strategies to mind. First, since the regret is correlated with the trade-off difficulty, the decision maker should be able to mitigate regret by rationalizing why the chosen option was superior. For example, options that are chosen on the basis of a gestalt process should result in less postoutcome regret, because an attribute-level process probably makes trade-offs more salient and thereby makes the decision maker more susceptible to self-reproach. By the same logic, regula- tory fit (e.g., Avnet & Higgins, 2006) should be a situational moderator of regret. When there is a fit, the decision feels right. Presumably this would attenuate postoutcome regret. Research proposition: Engaging in a gestalt-driven decision process rather than an attribute-level comparison process decreases regret. Research proposition: Regulatory fit moderates regret- people experiencing regulatory fit report less regret than people experiencing regulatory nonfit. Second, Janis and Mann (1977) postulated that immedi- acy of feedback increases anticipatory regret. Since this suggests a "present value" of regret on decision making,