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.
So, more than a half century after scholars and surveyors began probing individuals about their regrets, they had some answers to their two core questions.
What do people regret?
Lots of stuff.
Why do they have those regrets?
Something about opportunity.
The outcome remained intriguing, but unsatisfying.
OKAY, ONE MORE TIME
The world of survey research has changed considerably since 1953. For that very first regret poll, Gallup and his team interviewed about 1,500 people—often in person—and tabulated the responses without the assistance of even a mainframe computer. Today, my three-year-old smartphone packs more power than the computing might of all the world’s universities in the 1950s. And the laptop on which I’m writing this sentence connects me to billions of people across the globe and houses on its hard drive free, open-source software that can analyze massive amounts of data with such speed and ease it would astonish mid-twentieth-century statisticians.
I’m no George Gallup. But today’s tools are so powerful, and the costs are dropping so quickly, that even an amateur like me can follow his lead. So, nagged by the sense that we still didn’t truly understand what people regret, I tried to find out myself. Working with a large software and data analytics company, which itself contracted with firms that assemble panels of participants, we created the largest and most representative American survey on regret ever attempted—the American Regret Project. We polled 4,489 adults—whose gender, age, race, marital status, geography, income, and education level reflected the composition of the entire U.S. population.
The survey, a full version of which you can find online (www.danpink.com/surveyresults) asked participants seven demographic questions and eighteen research questions—including the big one:
Regrets are part of life. We all have something we wish we had done differently—or some action we wish we had taken or not taken.
Please look back on your life for a moment. Then describe in 2 or 3 sentences one significant regret you have.
Thousands upon thousands of regrets came spilling into our database. We asked people to place their regret into one of eight categories: career, family (parents, children, grandchildren), partners (spouses, significant others), education, health, finances, friends, something else. And we posed several other questions, many of which you’ll read about later in the book.
In our survey, family took the top spot. Nearly 22 percent of respondents voiced a regret in this category, followed closely by the 19 percent whose regret involved partners. Running just behind, and bunched together tightly, were education, career, and finance regrets. Health and friends regrets rounded out the list.
Most common regrets (2021)
SOURCE: Pink, Daniel, et al., American Regret Project (2021).