the consolation of philosophy sparknotes

Perhaps you’re familiar with the First Law of Holes: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” And perhaps you’ve ignored this law. Regret is the quintessential upward counterfactual-the ultimate If Only. If Only counterfactuals degrade our feelings now, but-and this is key-they can improve our lives later.

When researchers have tracked people’s thoughts by asking them to keep daily diaries or by pinging them randomly to ask what’s on their mind, they’ve discovered that If Onlys outnumber At Leasts in people’s lives-often by a wide margin.Īt Least counterfactuals preserve our feelings in the moment, but they rarely enhance our decisions or performance in the future. “If only I’d begun that final chase two seconds earlier, I’d have won a gold medal.” “If only I’d taken a few more stretch assignments, I’d have gotten that promotion.” If Onlys deliver discomfort and distress. If Onlys, by contrast, make us feel worse. “At least I ended up with a medal-unlike that American rider who blew it in the final seconds of the race and never reached the podium.” “I didn’t get that promotion, but at least I wasn’t fired.” At Leasts deliver comfort and consolation. It was a sign of brain damage.Īt Leasts make us feel better. In other words, the inability to feel regret-in some sense, the apotheosis of what the “no regrets” philosophy encourages-wasn’t an advantage. “These patients fail to grasp this concept.” “hey seem to experience no regret whatsoever,” neuroscientist Nathalie Camille and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science.

However, one group didn’t feel any worse when they discovered that a different choice would have produced a better outcome: people with lesions on a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. But when they spun a wheel, lost money, and learned that if they’d chosen the other wheel, they’d have won money, they felt really bad. When participants spun a wheel and lost money, they felt bad. Depending on where the arrow landed on their chosen wheel, they would either win money or lose money. A team of cognitive scientists organized a simple gambling game in which participants had to choose one of two computerized roulette-style wheels to spin.

The consolation of philosophy sparknotes