If I knew then what I know now: Advice to my younger self

ABSTRACT

If we could go back and give ourselves advice to keep from making a mistake, most of us would probably take that opportunity. Using self-discrepancy theory as a theoretical framework, US workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who were at least 30 years of age, indicated in two studies what their advice to their younger selves would be, what pivotal event was influential for them, if they had regrets, and if following this advice would bring them closer to their ideal or ought self. Across both studies, most of the advice fell into the domains of relationships, education, and selfhood. Participants said following the advice would bring them more in line with their ideal than their ought self. Following the advice also led to more positive perceptions of the current self by the high school self. Ages at which pivotal events occurred provided strong support for the reminiscence bump.

KEYWORDS:

• Advice
• regret
• self-discrepancy
• counterfactual thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data-availability

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/znkc3/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/znkc3/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robin M. Kowalski

Robin M. Kowalski is a Centennial Professor in the Psychology Department at Clemson University.

Annie McCord

Annie McCord is a doctoral student in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program at Clemson University.