Regrets and Priorities at Three Stages of Life

Abstract

The authors present results of a survey of 316 men and women from three age categories about their major regrets and priorities in life. The most frequently‐cited regrets were related to missed educational opportunities and the failure to have been more assertive and to have taken more risks. Differences between groups are analyzed and discussed.

In the Final Analysis: More Wisdom From People Who Have Faced Death

“…Questions were derived from related survey questions we found in the literature (e.g., see Feifel, 1959;Glaser & Strauss, 1966;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Kubler-Ross, 1969). We also asked more than 100 graduate students in counseling to critically evaluate our preliminary questions and provide us with questions that they would like to ask participants in a study like ours.…”

What We Regret Most... and Why

“…Overall, five data sets used the method of having participants select their biggest regrets from a list provided by the researchers (DeGenova, 1992; Landman & Manis, 1992, Samples 1 and 2;Landman et al, 1995); the remainder used the strategy of having participants record regrets, with independent coders subsequently assigning them to life domain categories. Also, in three of the data sets (Landman et al, 1995;Lecci et al, 1994;Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002), the researchers restricted their measure to regrets of 1 One commonly cited paper did not appear in the meta-analysis (Metha, Kinnier, & McWhirter, 1989) because it seemed that its data were redundant to those presented in Kinnier and Metha (1989). The only apparent difference is that the former paper reports data for the female participant subset included in the latter paper.…”

“…The first published report, by Kinnier and Metha (1989), required participants to look over their whole life and if they could live it again, to check as many as 3 aspects of their life that they would change from a list 8 life domains. 1 The sample consisted of adults of varying ages and occupations approached by graduate counseling students as part of a class project.…”

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…The Hattiangadi et al (1995) data for example show that inactions outnumbered actions by more than four to one, and that does not include a category of "indeterminate regrets" (those coded as "both" or "neither") which in the studies reported in the thesis were on average three times more likely to be general than specific. It would not be surprising to find similar patterns in surveys asking people to say what they would do if they had their lives to live over (DeGenoa, 1992;Hattiangadi et al, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Landman & Manis, 1992;Landman et al, 1995) because as Kahneman (1995) has suggested, requests for regrets tend to elicit elaborative counterfactuals about how life might have been better, which are likely to involve big changes of a general nature. In temporal construal terms (Trope & Liberman, 2003) such requests might be interpreted as an invitation to consider personal goals at the superordinate level, which would necessarily elicit "bigger picture" construals of distant events.…”

“…These findings come from surveys and experimental studies involving both sexes, all age groups, and different methods of eliciting regret. Some studies asked people directly what they regretted in life (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994;Jokisaari, 2003) or which of life"s activities they most regretted not having pursued (Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002), while others asked people to say how they would do things differently if they could live life over again (DeGenoa, 1992;Hattiangadi, Medvec & Gilovich, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Landman & Manis, 1992;Landman, Vanderwater, Stewart & Malley, 1995). Lecci, Okun and Karoly, (1994) asked people about their unfulfilled goals, which were seen as proxies for regret.…”