Je ne regrette rien

One of my students, Leesha, last year, conducted a qualitative study into how career changers have made sense of their career paths, and one thing she found was that the participants had no career regrets. They all made choices which didn't turn out so well, but none of them would say that they regretted their choices.

I have been thinking about this, and I wondered what literature there was, out there, which explored this idea of career regrets.

First of all, what do we actually mean by 'regret'?

Regret is a decision making emotion. It’s experienced when you realise that your current situation would now be better had you made a different choice (Landman,1993). It's a backwards looking emotion and signals that you believe you made a poor choice, but it also has links to forward looking emotions in that is has a role in determining future action and directing motivation. The research in this field has been applied to a range of different fields, including organisational behaviour (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004) but not really to career choice, despite the fact that career and education choices has been shown to be one of the things that people most regret in life. 

Specific definitions of regret are tricky: ‘The conceptual edges of regret are not sharp’ (Ovid and Gilovich p. 382). In general it is defined as the combination of an emotion and a judgement about a choice you made in the past, which led to your current life being worse that it could have been had you made a different choice. It is not thought to be something that you would do differently if you had your time again, although is often described in this way in the literature. It seems that we don't necessarily think that regrets are a bad thing, with evidence suggesting that we believe that regrets help to motivate us to strive for things we want, help us to better understand ourselves and our past and help to preserve harmonious relationships (Saffrey, Summerville & Roese, 2008).

What kinds of things do we regret?

You can, of course, regret things that you do (regret action) and regret things that you don't do (regret inaction). It seems that it takes us longer to get over an inaction regret than an action regret (so, for example, we recover from taking the wrong job more quickly than we recover from not taking the right job). But action regrets are more intense than inaction regrets. in general, if we can justify the decision we took, the regret is less.

Roese and Summerville (2005) also examined and concluded that opportunity breeds regret. If there is always a chance to go back and do something different, or do a new course, you are more likely to feel regret because you aren’t going to resolve dissonance so completely. Alternatively, if there is clearly no chance that you can fix things, you are more likely to make your peace with your situation more quickly, and the regret dissipates more quickly.  

How do we get over it?

There are two ways that we try to reduce the pain of regret. First there is action. We can put a new plan in to action which changes things. This is more likely to happen after a regrettable action than a regrettable inaction. Second, we can do something called psycholgical repair, which describes the process of chainging the way we think about the issue, and so reducing the regret we feel. We do this in two ways. We identify a silver lining (the job was clearly the wrong choice, but at least I got some experience of project management) or we do something called dissonance reduction, in which we convince ourselves that our current situation is better than we thought (I didn't really want that job anyway). This is explained by the theory of regret (Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2007).

But what about career regrets specifically?

There isn't very much written about career regrets as such even though it's clear that career regrets play heavily on a lot of people's minds.

Roese and Summerville (2005) in a meta-analysis of 11 regret ranking studies show that people regret (in order) educational, career, romance, parenting, self and leisure choices. Education accounts for 32% of all the reported regrets, career 22%. Morrison and Roese (2011) also found that career was one of the most common regrets (although this time ranking just below romance).

Career regrets associated with behaviour aimed at increasing objective success (promotion and pay) and with subjective success (choosing a values-driven career, or re-training). Sullivan and colleagues (2007) found that people who had been made redundant regretted not having played politics, and not having made more family-oriented career choices.

Santra and Giri (2017) found that IT professionals in India all had career regrets.They regretted things they did, things they didn't do, their career choices and their levels of career success, but inexplicably, their career regrets were positively correlated with job satisfaction: the more regrets they had, the happier they were at work.

I think there is more work to be done here. Why did Leesha's participants not regret their choices? They said that it was because even though they had made bad decisions, the decisions they made had led them to their current, positive position. So that might indicate that regret is linked with current levels of satisfaction. But that's not the findings from Santra and Giri's study. Those authors suggested that their surprising result might be explained by their cultural position, so perhaps another survey with UK participants could be valuable?

I'd be interested to explore the links between career regrets and current levels of satisfaction, and to see whether people regretted lack of subjective or objective success, and maybe whether or not there are explanations in the number of career changes people have had: their opportunities for course correction.

  

References

Morrison, M., & Roese, N. J. (2011). Regrets of the typical American: Findings from a nationally representative sample. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(6), 576-583.

Roese, N. J., & Summerville, A. (2005). What we regret most... and why. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(9), 1273-1285. 

Saffrey, C., Summerville, A., & Roese, N. J. (2008). Praise for regret: People value regret above other negative emotions. Motivation and emotion, 32(1), 46-54.

Santra, S., & Giri, V. N. (2017). IMPACT OF CAREER REGRET ON CAREER OUTCOMES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) PROFESSIONALS IN INDIA. ASBBS Proceedings, 24(1), 481. 

Sullivan, S. E., Forret, M. L., & Mainiero, L. A. (2007). No regrets? An investigation of the relationship between being laid off and experiencing career regrets. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(8), 787-804.

Goerke, Moller, & Schulz-Hardt, 2004; Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004