The Amazing Power of Regret to Shape Our Future {and how we can use this for Ron Paul)
Submitted by Bob-45 on Sat, 01/14/2012 - 20:14Why people are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets, but will happily exchange pens.
Regret might not make a list of the most powerful emotions. It would probably include things like anger, happiness, jealousy, sadness and especially for us English, embarrassment.
We tend to think of regret as essentially a backward-looking emotion. We regret things in the past, like not trying hard enough in school, how we treated a friend or the things we said to our partner in the heat of an argument. In this sense you might argue that it's useless: why regret something you can't change?
But regret isn't just a backward-looking emotion, it also looks forward and it can be a terribly powerful emotion which affects our behaviour in the here and now. That's because we also have the power to anticipate feeling regret in the future, which we naturally try to avoid. My favourite example involves a simple study about lottery tickets and pens.
[In other words, we must focus on the consequences of NOT supporting Ron Paul and turning our country and the future of humanity around.]
