The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

by Daniel H. Pink

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 fro...