“How can thinking about your future affect your current behaviors and self-perception?”
A single question that launched a 10-month empirical research endeavor and added new insights to an established social-psychological theory.
Overview
What would motivate the senior vice president of a Wall Street investment company to quit his six-figure job to sell books from his garage? 2 things: Thinking about his future and thinking about the things he would regret. Before taking that leap, the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, realized that he might not regret the things he tried and failed at, but he might regret not having tried at all.
Researchers have found that thinking about who you want to be in the future, and feelings you may anticipate as part of that process, can affect your intentions and behaviors. In my thesis, I examined how college students’ feelings of anticipating regret and thinking about the future influenced seeking information.
My Role
Principal Investigator
Duration
10-months
Tools
Qualtrics, SPSS, COMG Research System
Reviewing past research
With the escalating cost of higher education in the U.S., college students are feeling pressure to decide on their future career.
Previous studies have shown that how students think about their future careers impacts their levels of anxiety and engagement in career planning.
In my project, I investigated whether anticipating regret from not seeking help, and how clearly students can visualize their future selves, helps them manage information about their future careers.
Methods: Who? What? How?
To test this, 194 university students completed a questionnaire about how they would manage and seek information about their future careers from career counselors.
Results from my study demonstrated that…
The more participants felt negative emotions about their degree of career uncertainty, the more they felt that a career counselor’s advice could help them to imagine a positive version of themselves in their future work.
Second, the more students could visualize a positive image of themselves, the more they felt confident about managing the information they might receive, the more they believed they could communicate effectively with a career counselor, and the more they believed a career counselor could be helpful to them.
Finally, the more students anticipate regret from not speaking with a career counselor, the more likely they were to seek information from one.
What does this all mean?
The results of my thesis suggest that anticipating regret plays an important role in predicting college student’s information seeking – in particular, anticipating regret and future work selves can be specific costs and benefits that students consider when they decide to seek information.
Lastly, my study demonstrates that the more students can envision a positive version of themselves with the help of a career counselor, the more they can feel confident in making that future self a reality.
Would you like to hear more about this project?
Let’s nerd out together.
