The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (181 POCHE)

by Michael Lewis

That was another rule of regret. It skewed any decision in which a person faced a choice between a sure thing and a gamble. This tendency was not merely of academic interest. Danny and Amos agreed that there was a real-world equivalent of a “sure thing”: the status quo. The status quo was what people assumed they would get if they failed to take action. “Many instances of prolonged hesitation, and of continued reluctance to take positive action, should probably be explained in this fashion,” wrote Danny to Amos. They played around with the idea that the anticipation of regret might play an even greater role in human affairs than it did if people could somehow know what would have happened if they had chosen differently. “The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds,” Danny wrote. “We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse …. Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.”