Over the ensuing decades, pollsters became less interested in regret, but academics assumed the mantle. In the 1980s, Janet Landman and Jean Manis of the University of Michigan examined the regrets of a collection of both female undergraduates and adult women who’d visited the university’s career center. The top regrets of each group landed squarely in the realm of education. For the older women, If Only thoughts typically involved curtailing their studies too early.[3] In 1989, Arlene Metha and Richard Kinnier of Arizona State University surveyed the major regrets of women in three age cohorts—those in their twenties, people between ages thirty-five and fifty-five, and those sixty-four and older. Across all three groups, the top regret they chose was “I would have taken my education more seriously and worked harder on it.”？[4] A different set of Arizona State researchers surveyed community college students a few years later and found similar results. “Educational/academic” regrets were most frequent.[5] In 1992, Mary Kay DeGenova, a family studies scholar, surveyed retired people and found that among the domains of friends, family, work, education, religion, leisure, and health, the most common regret was education.[6]
On it went. At Cornell University, Victoria Medvec and Thomas Gilovich, who conducted the famous Olympic medal study I described in Chapter 3, in 1994 asked an assortment of people about their regrets. Education—both “missed educational opportunities” and “bad educational choice”—came out on top. （Personal relationships—“missed romantic opportunity” and “unwise romantic adventure”—finished next.）？[7] The following year, Medvec and Gilovich joined Nina Hattiangadi to study the regrets of seventy-somethings who as children had been identified as high-IQ prodigies. Once again, education topped their list—including regrets about wasting time in college, choosing the wrong field of study, and not completing enough schooling.[8]
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.