Conceptualizing Regret: The Dynamics of Leaving White Supremacy

Recent research suggests that membership within Far Right groups has a profound impact on people's sense of self, beliefs, emotions, relationships, and wider life trajectories. Much of the work on emotions and far right mobilization focuses on strong emotions, such as anger, hate, and fear. Our paper explores the presence of regret, a more subtle type of emotion that sociologists have generally neglected. Drawing on life history interviews with 47 former members of far right groups in the United States, we offer two main contributions in this paper. We draw on a range of cases to define how regret manifests among former far right members and develop an analytic strategy on how to identify more subtle emotions such as regret in ethnographic data. Second, we assess how regret links to the sunk cost fallacy. Does the investment of participating in such movements impede the effect of regret in disrupting pathways? Are there instances when regret may overcome assessments of sunk cost? Finally, we distinguish between "localized" and "generalized" regret. Our evidence suggests that former members continue to feel "localized regret" at how their involvement disrupted their past lives and relationships and disrupted important aspects of the social fabric. Generalized types of regret are less common, however, as participants tend to favor framing their experiences with extremism as a necessary part of their lives rather than wishing none of it had ever happened.