Regret, learning, and temptation

Abstract Regret compounds the pain of mistakes by making us ruminate on the past. Is there any value in this compounded suffering? An intuitive and widely endorsed view, the learning view , states that regret has value because it helps us learn from our mistakes. This paper challenges the learning view. I show that we often learn from our mistakes without regret, through a process I call “belief‐driven learning.” The challenge is to explain what value regret adds to our lives, over and above belief‐driven learning. To meet the challenge, I develop the idea that regret helps us overcome temptation. I show that belief‐driven learning falters for mistakes made due to temptation because the source of error is not epistemic, but motivational. I argue that the ruminative processes involved in regret can help us learn in the face of temptation by reshaping our motivational tendencies, bringing them into better alignment with the values we endorse.