The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(16)

In 2005, Neal Roese and Amy Summerville decided to round up the existing research to determine with greater certainty which “domains in life produce the greatest potential for regret.” Their meta-analytic summary examined nine previous studies, including the ones I mentioned above, and established twelve categories of regret—for example, career (“If only I were a dentist”), romance (“I wish I’d married Jake instead of Edward”), and parenting (“If only I’d spent more time with my kids”). Education again came out on top. Thirty-two percent of the 3,041 participants in the studies they analyzed selected it as their prime regret.





Most common regrets (2005)


         SOURCE: Roese, Neal J., and Amy Summerville. “What we regret most . . . and why.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 9 (2005): 1273–1285.





“Education is the number one regret at least in part because in contemporary society, new and further education of one sort or another is available to nearly all individuals,” they concluded. If you didn’t finish college, you might be able to return. If you needed additional training or skills, the right courses might be available. If you didn’t earn a graduate degree in your twenties, maybe you can pursue one in your forties or fifties. “Opportunity breeds regret,” they wrote, and “education is open to continual modification throughout life.”[9]

Roese and Summerville titled their paper “What We Regret Most . . . and Why.” And its conclusion seemed straightforward. But this analysis didn’t settle the issue. They and other researchers soon discovered that their answer to the “what” was faulty—and that their answer to the “why” revealed something deeper than they realized.





WHAT DO PEOPLE REALLY REGRET?


The studies that concluded that education was our greatest regret, despite passing peer review, were pocked with flaws. For instance, most of them took place on college campuses, where concerns about degrees, majors, and curriculum pervade conversation. If the surveys had been conducted in, say, hospitals, pharmacies, or doctors’ offices, perhaps health regrets would have dominated.

More important, as Roese and Summerville note, the previous research relied on “samples of convenience” rather than representative slices of the total population. In one study, researchers asked graduate students to hand out questionnaires to people they knew, not exactly the gold standard for random sampling. The study of retired people surveyed 122 older adults living near Purdue University—even though it’s unlikely that as western Indiana goes, so goes the rest of the world. In another study, the interviewees were a bricolage of ten emeritus professors, eleven nursing home residents, forty undergraduate students, and sixteen clerical and custodial staff. Roese and Summerville noted that 73 percent of the total sample in their meta-analysis were women, hardly the gender ratio that statistics best practices demand. An overwhelming number of the people surveyed were White. Even the Gallup polls, which were more representative of the U.S. population, often produced less than definitive results. In the 1953 poll, 15 percent of people chose education as their single biggest regret. But an even larger portion—about 40 percent—gave more than one answer to the question.

What was needed, Roese and Summerville concluded toward the end of their paper, was a survey that represented the diversity and complexity of the entire country. And in 2011, Roese and his colleague Mike Morrison took up the challenge. They reached beyond the college campus with a telephone poll of 370 people from across America. Random digit dialing ensured the sample didn’t skew toward any single region or demographic group. They asked their participants to report one significant regret in detail, which a team of independent raters then assigned to one of twelve life domains. It was “the first truly representative portrait of where in life the typical American has their biggest regrets,” Roese and Morrison wrote.

The portrait they offered—titled “Regrets of the Typical American: Findings from a Nationally Representative Sample”—looked quite different from what had come before. The regrets were widely distributed across several areas of life, with no single category capturing more than 20 percent of the public mind. Regrets involving romance—lost loves and unfulfilling relationships—were the most common, comprising about 19 percent of the total regrets. Family finished next with 17 percent. Education and career each garnered 14 percent.[10]





Most common regrets (2011)


         SOURCE: Morrison, Mike, and Neal J. Roese. “Regrets of the typical American: Findings from a nationally representative sample. Social Psychological and Personality Science 2, no. 6 (2011): 576–583.





This more diverse sample also allowed researchers to derive other insights. For example, women were more likely than men to have romance and family regrets. People with the least formal education were more likely to have education regrets, while single, unattached people harbored more romance regrets.

The reasons also veered from previous findings. Once again, the researchers concluded that regret hinged on opportunity. However, while the earlier study suggested that regret lurked in realms where people perceived lots of opportunities, this study found the opposite. Areas where the opportunities had vanished—for instance, considering oneself too old for additional education—produced the most regrets. Such low-opportunity regrets (in which a problem could not be fixed) outnumbered high-opportunity regrets (in which a problem could be fixed) by a solid margin.