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Daniel H. PinkA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Counterfactual thinking describes thinking about what could have been, or what could be. It aligns with humans’ ability to tell stories and imagine realities that do not exist. It is a precondition for experiencing regret, which is what makes regret an innately human emotion.
Fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute one’s or another person’s behavior and decision-making to personality, rather than considering a person’s larger context. Pink points out that people often commit the same error when evaluating the cause of foundation regrets, referring to this tendency as foundation attribution error. He highlights the fact that foundation regrets can be caused by a person’s lack of guidance or opportunities. With this in mind, people should refrain from judging themselves for their foundation regrets, and instead do better going forward and consider helping others avoid making the same mistakes.
Economist Harry Markowitz conceived modern portfolio theory in the early 1950s, earning him a Nobel Prize. The theory advises diversifying one’s investment portfolio and revolutionized investors’ approach to the stock market, as investors long believed a person should invest in only one or two high-potential stocks. Pink points out that the theory also applies to emotions, that people should value all emotions rather than solely the positive ones.
The moral foundations theory is the idea that morality extends beyond the virtues of care and fairness and varies by demographic group. This term is used by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who published the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. According to the theory, beliefs about morality stand on five pillars: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty, disloyalty, authority/subversion, and purity/desecration. By categorizing how humans assess the morality of behavior, moral foundations theory is portrayed as an avenue for interpreting and understanding moral regrets.
Pluralistic ignorance is the phenomenon in which people erroneously think their beliefs and preferences are different from everyone else’s, especially when these beliefs and preferences contradict observations of others. In The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, Pink aligns pluralistic ignorance with people’s tendency to believe that reaching out to estranged family and friends will cause discomfort. Because of this, people fail to reach out. Being conscious of pluralistic ignorance can enable people to overcome their fear of failure to establish meaningful relationships.
Self-distancing is Pink’s third and final strategy (aside from self-disclosure and self-compassion) for viewing regret objectively and involves speaking about the self in the third person. This strategy prevents us from overidentifying with emotions, allowing for a more levelheaded approach to coping with and optimizing regrets.
Temporal discounting is an economic term in which one overvalues the present while undervaluing the future. Pink applies this term to an American Regret Project participant’s loss of money and Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” in which the grasshopper prioritizes short-term gratification over long-term survival.
By Daniel H. Pink