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Regrets and Priorities at Three Stages of Life
Abstract
Surveyed 138 men and 178 women in 3 age categories (20–29, 30–55, and 64+ yrs) about their major regrets and priorities in life. The most frequently cited regrets were related to missed educational opportunities. Younger Ss were more concerned about careers and romance than older Ss; older Ss rated family higher and expressed more regret about not having spent more time with family. Although young men set higher priorities on career and lower priorities on family than did women, men (especially older men) more often wished they had spent more time with family. The only difference found between the most and least satisfied Ss was that the least satisfied Ss wished they had taken more risks in their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Longer-term regrets of (un)taken developmental paths, sometimes called "life regrets," have been focused on in life-span research. Studies in developmental psychology have concentrated on regret content and associations with perceived control and well-being, either in older adulthood (e.g., Alexander et al., 1992;Hattiangadi et al., 1995;Newall et al., 2009;Wrosch et al., 2007) or different adult age groups (e.g., Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Lecci et al., 1994;Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002). These studies have typically used correlational approaches with mostly cross-sectional designs. ...
... Missed opportunities in education have turned out to be the most frequently named regret across different age groups, followed by career-related regrets (for a summary, see Roese & Summerville, 2005, whereas the dominance of educational and career regrets could not be replicated in a more recent study with older adults; Newall et al., 2009). Family-related regrets are more frequently found in non-student than in student samples (e.g., Alexander et al., 1992;Kinnier & Metha, 1989). Examples of family-related regrets reported in a study by Hattiangadi et al. (1995) include "should have spent more time in family relationships" and "should have spent more time with children and/or grandchildren when they were young." ...
... Some work-family regrets might even gain in psychological importance years after decisions had been made, for example, when people look back at their lives at an older age. Kinnier and Metha (1989) found that the regret of not having spent more quality time with the family was more often named by older than by younger and middle-aged adults. Regrets about a decision made long ago might also be activated by critical events (e.g., being laid off; Sullivan et al., 2007) that prompt reevaluations. ...
Postpartum mothers have to decide whether to leave the workforce for some time and, if so, when to return to paid work. Two kinds of regrets might evolve as a result of women’s leave‐related decisions: stay‐at‐home and return‐to‐work regrets. The present research investigates how these forms of regrets are associated with women’s affective organizational commitment. We conducted a four‐wave longitudinal study with female participants mostly living in Switzerland (61 %) and Germany (37 %). The first measurement occasion took place during pregnancy (N = 294), and the subsequent three postnatal measurement points were at six (n = 281), twelve (n = 254), and 24 months (n = 230) after childbirth. As expected, higher organizational commitment during pregnancy predicted stronger stay‐at‐home regrets. By contrast, women’s prenatal organizational commitment did not turn out to be predictive for lowered return‐to‐work regrets. We further assumed cross‐lagged associations between post‐birth organizational commitment and return‐to‐work regrets. Our results suggest that return‐to‐work regrets are predictive of decreases in affective organizational commitment. Reversed causation, i.e., effects from postnatal organizational commitment to return‐to‐work regrets, could not be confirmed. Results are discussed regarding theoretical, methodological, and practical implications.
... However, there is also evidence that the experience of counterfactual thought and emotion following action dissipates over time (Byrne, 2005;Gilovich & Medvec, 1994Gilovich, Medvec, & Chen, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Roese & Summerville, 2005). In part this seems due to processes of cognitive dissonance reduction (see Cooper & Fazio, 1984;Festinger, 1957;Gilovich et al., , 2003. ...
... Nevertheless, the current experiment also found evidence that the initial effect of choice level on psychological satisfaction does not appear to be long lasting, with a significant reduction in the effect over a 2-week period. This result appears to be in line with counterfactual theory, specifically with evidence suggesting that a reduction in the experience of counterfactual emotion will follow action over time (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994Kinnier & Metha, 1989). ...
People are often more satisfied with a choice (e.g., chocolates, pens) when the number of options in the choice set is “just right” (e.g., 10–12), neither too few (e.g., 2–4) nor too many (e.g., 30–40). We investigated this “Goldilocks effect” in the context of a placebo treatment. Participants reporting nonspecific complaints (e.g., headaches) chose one of Bach's 38 Flower Essences from a choice set of 2 (low choice), 12 (optimal choice), or 38 (full choice) options to use for a 2-week period. Replicating earlier findings in the novel context of a health-related choice, participants were initially more satisfied with the essence they selected when presented with 12 versus either 2 or 38 options. More importantly, self-reported symptoms were significantly lower 2 weeks later in the optimal (12) versus nonoptimal choice conditions (2 and 38). Because there is no known active ingredient in Bach's Flower Essences, we refer to this as the Goldilocks placebo effect. Supporting a counterfactual thinking account of the Goldilocks effect, and despite significantly fewer symptoms after 2 weeks, those in the optimal choice set condition were no longer significantly more satisfied with their choice at the end of testing. Implications for medical practice, especially patient choice, are discussed.
... Our findings with respect to the specific content of people's regrets closely match those obtained by previous investigators. For instance, the most common regret mentioned by subjects surveyed by Kinnier and Metha (1989;Metha et al., 1989) was that they did not take their education more seriously and work harder at it-the most common regret listed by our respondents as well (see also Cantril, 1965, for a similar finding). Their subjects, like ours, also expressed concern about the lack of time spent with family and about their reluctance to take risks ("seize the moment"). ...
Through telephone surveys, written questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews, it was found that people's biggest regrets tend to involve things they have failed to do in their lives. This conflicts with research on counterfactual thinking that indicates that people regret unfortunate outcomes that stem from actions taken more than identical outcomes that result from actions foregone. These divergent findings were reconciled by demonstrating that people's regrets follow a systematic time course: Actions cause more pain in the short-term, but inactions are regretted more in the long run. Support for this contention was obtained in 2 scenario experiments that assessed people's beliefs about the short- and long-term regrets of others and in an experiment that asked Ss about their own regrets of action and inaction from 2 time periods. Several mechanisms that can account for this temporal pattern are discussed.
... Consistent with the adage 'Failing to plan is planning to fail', research on judgment and decisionmaking has found that insufficient foresight is a major source of mistakes that people come to regret (Kinnier and Metha, 1989), such as neglecting their education and failing to save for retirement (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007;Goda et al., 2019;Wang and Sloan, 2018). One way to address this problem is to increase people's decision-making competence (i.e., boosting; Hertwig and Grüne-Yanoff, 2017) by helping them learn to use more far-sighted decision strategies. ...
Short-sighted decisions can have devastating consequences, and teaching people to make their decisions in a more far-sighted way is challenging. Previous research found that reflecting on one’s behavior can boost learning from success and failure. Here, we explore the potential benefits of guiding people to reflect on whether and how they thought about what to do (i.e., systematic metacognitive reflection ). We devised a series of Socratic questions that prompt people to reflect on their decision-making and tested their effectiveness in a process-tracing experiment with a 5-step planning task ( N=265 ). Each participant went through several cycles of making a series of decisions and then either reflecting on how they made those decisions, answering unrelated questions, or moving on to the next decision right away. We found that systematic metacognitive reflection helps people discover adaptive, far-sighted decision strategies faster. Our results suggest that systematic metacognitive reflection is a promising approach to boosting people’s decision-making competence.
... Many researchers working on judgment and decision-making (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974;Gilovich et al., 2002) have argued that human decision-making is plagued by many systematic errors known as cognitive biases (but see Gigerenzer, 1991;Gigerenzer et al., 2008). In particular, older people often come to regret the short-sighted decisions they made about their health, education, and finances when they were younger (Kinnier & Metha, 1989). Consistent with this observation, numerous experiments on intertemporal choice have consistently found that people's decisions depend primarily on the immediate outcomes of potential choices and underweight their more weighty long-term consequences (Milkman et al., 2008;O'Donoghue & Rabin, 2015). ...
Human decision-making is plagued by many systematic errors. Many of these errors can be avoided by providing decision aids that guide decision-makers to attend to the important information and integrate it according to a rational decision strategy. Designing such decision aids used to be a tedious manual process. Advances in cognitive science might make it possible to automate this process in the future. We recently introduced machine learning methods for discovering optimal strategies for human decision-making automatically and an automatic method for explaining those strategies to people. Decision aids constructed by this method were able to improve human decision-making. However, following the descriptions generated by this method is very tedious. We hypothesized that this problem can be overcome by conveying the automatically discovered decision strategy as a series of natural language instructions for how to reach a decision. Experiment 1 showed that people do indeed understand such procedural instructions more easily than the decision aids generated by our previous method. Encouraged by this finding, we developed an algorithm for translating the output of our previous method into procedural instructions. We applied the improved method to automatically generate decision aids for a naturalistic planning task (i.e., planning a road trip) and a naturalistic decision task (i.e., choosing a mortgage). Experiment 2 showed that these automatically generated decision aids significantly improved people’s performance in planning a road trip and choosing a mortgage. These findings suggest that AI-powered boosting might have potential for improving human decision-making in the real world.
... Consistent with the adage "Failing to plan is planning to fail", research on judgment and decision-making has found that insufficient foresight is a major source of mistakes that people come to regret (Kinnier & Metha, 1989), such as neglecting their education and failing to save for retirement (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007;Goda et al., 2019;Wang & Sloan, 2018). One way to address this problem, is to increase people's decision-making competence (i.e., boosting; Hertwig & Grüne-Yanoff, 2017) by helping them learn to use more far-sighted decision strategies. ...
Shortsighted decisions can have devastating consequences, and teaching people to make their decisions in a more far-sighted way is challenging. Previous research found that reflecting on one's behavior can boost learning from success and failure. Here, we explore the potential benefits of guiding people to reflect on whether and how they thought about what to do (i.e., systematic metacognitive reflection). We devised a series of Socratic questions that prompt people to reflect on their decision-making and tested their effectiveness in a process-tracing experiment with a 5-step planning task (= 265). Each participant went through several cycles of making a series of decisions and then either reflecting on how they made those decisions, answering unrelated questions, or moving on to the next decision right away. We found that systematic metacognitive reflection helps people discover adaptive, far-sighted decision strategies faster. Our results suggest that systematic metacognitive reflection is a promising approach to boosting people's decision-making competence.
... In order to assess the life role salience of the participants, we asked them which one was more important to them ("What do you consider to be more important to yourself now: an ideal romantic long-term partner or an ideal job?"), in line with a similar procedure employed in the research performed by Kinnier and Metha (1989). ...
The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences between men and women regarding their romantic and professional choices. A sample of 60 young women and a sample of 60 young men participated in an experiment to assess the likelihood of settling for less-desired romantic partners and jobs when their ideal romantic partner and job were difficult to attain. The experiment asked them to write down the five most important attributes of their ideal romantic partner; afterward, they were told they could stay with that partner if they spent six months in jail as opposed to staying with a partner that possesses the last three attributes they mentioned. The same procedure was applied to choosing a job. Results indicated that men were more likely to settle for a less than ideal partner, whereas women were more willing to overcome the proposed obstacle in order to stay with their desired romantic partner; when presented with the same two options regarding their ideal job, both men and women chose to overcome the imposed obstacle in order to obtain their ideal job. The attachment style of the participants had an influence only on the participants’ choices regarding their romantic long term ideal partner. The results are discussed in the light of their contribution to gender differences research, work-family enrichment and ways of coping with work-family conflict.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether communication skills of adults are different in terms of gender and age and to reveal that personality traits predict communication skills. For this purpose data were collected from 187 adults whose ages were ranging between 22 and 46 by Communication Skills Scale-Adult Form (and Five Factor Inventory. The data were analyzed by using SPSS 20 via t test, one way ANOVA and stepwise regression. In the result of analysis, it was determined that the total score of female’s communication skills get higher scores than males in the subscale of active listening and non-verbal communication and complying with the communication principles. There were differences only caring communication dimension by age. According to this, it was found that pay attention to communication increases as age increases. It was determined that about 17.8% of total score in communication skills were explained by extraversion and conscientiousness personality traits.Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. ÖzetBu araştırmanın amacı yetişkinlerin cinsiyet ve yaşlarına göre iletişim becerilerinin farklılaşıp farklılaşmadığını belirlemek ve kişilik özelliklerinin iletişim becerilerini yordayıcılığını ortaya koymaktır. Bu amaçla yaşları 22 ile 46 arasında değişen 187 yetişkinden İletişim Becerileri Ölçeği-Yetişkin Formu Beş Faktör Kişilik Ölçeği aracılığıyla veri toplanmıştır. Verilerin analizi SPSS 20 programı kullanılarak t testi, tek yönlü varyans analizi, aşamalı regresyon yapılarak gerçekleştirilmiştir. Yapılan analizler sonucunda kadınların toplam iletişim becerileri puanının, etkin dinleme ve sözel olmayan iletişim ile iletişim ilkelerine uyma alt boyutundan elde edilen puanların erkeklerin puanlarından istatistiksel olarak düzeyde yüksek olduğu belirlenmiştir. Yaşa göre yalnızca iletişime özen gösterme boyutunda, daha ileri yaştakiler lehine farklılıklar vardır. Toplam iletişim becerileri puanının %17.8’inin, dışadönüklük ve özdenetim kişilik faktörleri ile açıklandığı belirlenmiştir.
Interest in the subjective well-being of the elderly was kindled by social gerontologists'efforts to test theories of successful aging and to improve the quality of life of older people. Although a large body of studies have been amassed, critics have commented that this literature is contradictory and noncumulative. We review research on correlates and components of subjective well-being among the elderly. Drawing on quantitative and narrative reviews, we find that associations between indicators of subjective well-being and variables often correlated with them are generally weak. Our synthesis offactor analytic investigations among the elderly reveals that scales have more than one factor, and positive affect, negative affect, and cognition are components of subjective well-being. Implications are noted for understanding the relation between the objective environment and subjective well-being, program evaluation, and enhancing subjective well-being.
Reviews the literature since 1967 on subjective well-being (SWB [including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect]) in 3 areas: measurement, causal factors, and theory. Most measures of SWB correlate moderately with each other and have adequate temporal reliability and internal consistency; the global concept of happiness is being replaced with more specific and well-defined concepts, and measuring instruments are being developed with theoretical advances; multi-item scales are promising but need adequate testing. SWB is probably determined by a large number of factors that can be conceptualized at several levels of analysis, and it may be unrealistic to hope that a few variables will be of overwhelming importance. Several psychological theories related to happiness have been proposed; they include telic, pleasure and pain, activity, top–down vs bottom–up, associanistic, and judgment theories. It is suggested that there is a great need to more closely connect theory and research. (7 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Discusses formulations of life course, life cycle, life structure, and the adult development of the life structure in early and middle adulthood that originated in the author's (see record
1980-20834-001) initial study of men's lives and continues in his (in press) study of women's lives. Nine developmental periods from ages 17–22 yrs to ages 60–65 yrs are outlined; the sequence consists of structure-building and structure-changing (transitional) periods. Six major issues in a structural approach to adult development are discussed. What are the alternative ways of defining a structural stage or period? What relative emphasis is given to the structures as compared to the transitional periods? How can the best use be made of the distinction between hierarchical levels and seasons of development? Are there age-linked developmental periods in adulthood? What are the relative merits and limitations of various research methods? How can the developmental perspective and the socialization perspective be brought together? (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Presents a progress report on developing and applying a research approach to improve the quality of life. Steps in the plan include (a) the empirical definition of the quality of life of adults, (b) surveys of 3 age groups (30-, 50-, and 70-yr-olds) showing their ratings of importance and assessments of needs met for the 15 factors defining quality of life, (c) a study of the specific factors tending to make 85% of American adults report their quality of life as good or better, (d) illustrations showing the advantages of using in-depth studies of individuals to identify the determiners of quality of life, and (e) development of a simulation model to evaluate proposals for improving the quality of life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examines how the dynamics of stress and coping change with circumstances of living and processes of aging. The answer has remained obscure for 3 main reasons. (1) The state of the art in the measurement of stress and coping is still primitive. (2) Personal beliefs, values, and commitments, which develop from a person's unique history, shape appraisal of stress and manner in which stress is coped with and therefore have profound consequences for morale, social and work functioning, and somatic health. (3) Most of the observations relevant to the central question have been obtained cross-sectionally; however, because the significance of any given event is embedded in the individual's personal, lifelong drama, it is important to examine stress and coping longitudinally as well. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A research approach to improving our quality of life
- Flanagan