What You See is What You Regret

Regret is a counterfactual emotion that arises when one judges that an outcome would have been better if one had acted differently. Classic accounts distinguish between commission regret (regretting an action) and omission regret (regretting an inaction). Here, we re-examine this distinction through the lens of attention and counterfactual salience. We find that externally highlighting subsets of options reliably increased omission and commission regret even after action. Increasing the size of the salient set attenuated regret intensity. When participants actively constructed their own consideration sets, the same patterns emerged. These findings suggest that commission--omission asymmetries may depend less on action versus inaction per se, and more on how attention shapes the space of salient counterfactuals, with implications for when regret might support adaptive learning or disrupt it.