Table Of ContentWhat Might Have Been:
The Social Psychology
of Counterfactual Thinking
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What Might Have Been:
The Social Psychology
of Counterfactual Thinking
Edited by
Neal J. Roese
Northwestern University
and
James M. Olson
University of Western Ontario
I p Psychology Press
A Taylor & Francis Croup
NEW YORK AND LONDON
First Published 1995 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
What might have been : the social psychology of counterfactual
thinking / edited by Neal.I. Roese, James Olson,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-805-81613-6 (alk. paper). — ISBN 978-0-805-81614-3 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Thought and thinking. I. Roese, Neal J. II. Olson, James M.
BF441.W46 1995
153.4—dc20 95-8025
CIP
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
ISBN-13: 978-1-315-80641-9
Contents
Preface vii
1 Counterfactual Thinking: A Critical Overview 1
Neal ]. Roese and James M. Olson
2 Counterfactual Constraints 57
Eric P. Seelau, Sheila M. Seelau, Gary L. Wells,
and Paul D. Windschitl
3 Individual Differences in Counterfactual Thinking 81
Margaret Kasimatis and Gary L. Wells
4 Comparison Processes in Counterfactual Thought 103
David Dunning and Scott F. Madey
5 Living in Neither the Best Nor Worst of All Possible
Worlds: Antecedents and Consequences of
Upward and Downward Counterfactual Thinking 133
Matthew N. McMullen, Keith D. Markman,
and Igor Gavanski
6 Functions of Counterfactual Thinking 169
Neal ]. Roese and James M. Olson
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Dysfunctional Implications of Counterfactual Thinking:
When Alternatives to Reality Fail Us 199
Steven ]. Sherman and Allen R. McConnell
8 Through a Glass Darkly: Worldviews,
Counterfactual Thought, and Emotion 233
Janet Landman
9 Some Counterfactual Determinants of Satisfaction
and Regret 259
Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec
10 With an Eye Toward the Future: The Impact
of Counterfactual Thinking on Affect, Attitudes,
and Behavior 283
Faith Gleicher, David S. Boninger, Alan Strathman,
David Armor, John Hetts, and Mina Ahn
11 Counterfactual Thought, Regret, and Superstition:
How to Avoid Kicking Yourself 305
Dale T. Miller and Brian R. Taylor
12 Counterfactual and Contrastive Reasoning
in Explanations for Performance:
Implications for Gender Bias 333
Ann L. McGill and Jill G. Klein
13 Counterfactual Thinking and Coping
With Traumatic Life Events 353
Christopher G. Davis and Darrin R. Lehman
14 Varieties of Counterfactual Thinking 375
Daniel Kahneman
Author Index 397
Subject Index 407
Preface
There are ever so many ways that a world might be; and one of these many
ways is the way that this world is.
—David Lewis (1986, p. 2)
Within a few short years, research on counterfactual thinking has mush
roomed, establishing itself as one of the signature domains within social
psychology. This sudden popularity is easily understood. Counterfactual
thinking is something familiar to nearly everyone. Even if they have not
previously heard the term counterfactual, people instantly recognize it,
once it has been defined for them, as something with which they are
intimately acquainted. Few indeed have never regretted some action or
yearned to have avoided some circumstance. But it is the childlike wonder
with which we gaze on "what might have been," into realms of possible,
alternative worlds, which truly underlies the excitement of counterfactual
research. What if Kennedy had survived his assassin's bullets into a
second term in the White House? What if the Nazis had triumphed over
the Western democracies in the Second World War? What if your parents
had never met? There is something at once obsessively compelling and
oddly unsettling about confronting the unrealities that might well have
been. In intermixing fantasy and free-form creativity with the tangible
truths of our lives, such subjunctive suppositions have the potential to
inform, enrich, emote, and even entertain us. As Douglas Hofstadter
wrote, "Think how immeasurably poorer our mental lives would be if
Vlll PREFACE
we didn't have this creative capacity for slipping out of the midst of
reality into soft 'what ifs'!" (p. 643).
The traditionally identified starting point in the history of social-cognitive
research on counterfactual thinking was a brief yet provocative book
chapter written by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1982. In this
first milestone, they identified many of the directions counterfactual
theorists have taken their work over the ensuing years, touching on such
issues as determinants of counterfactual thoughts, their connection to
perceptions of causality, and their emotional consequences. The compel
ling metaphor of the mental "simulation," of setting initial conditions
then "running" a scenario through to possible outcomes as may be done
with computer-based models, was born here. The next milestone was the
publication of the multifaceted norm theory in 1986. There, Danny
Kahneman and Dale Miller described the mechanisms of exemplar-based
online construction of comparison standards. Now regarded as one of
the most influential theoretical statements to have emerged in the 1980s,
its impact has extended not only to counterfactual research but also to
work on categorization, stereotypes, and impression formation. There has
not yet been a third, single theoretical milestone that continues the
progression initiated by these two influential papers. Rather, there has
been a striking proliferation of empirical research projects citing and
directly inspired by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) and Kahneman and
Miller (1986). Extending into numerous theoretical and applied veins,
counterfactual research is rapidly becoming one of the most dynamic and
exciting theoretical approaches in social-cognitive psychology.
This volume is an attempt to capture some of this excitement. Sufficient
progress has been made in the understanding of counterfactual thinking
that a "critical mass," of sorts, has been reached. The time seemed ideal
for bringing together into a single volume the most recent thoughts and
the most cutting-edge research of active counterfactual theorists. Our
hope is to create that third milestone: a single source for current theory
in which past achievements are refined and new directions charted.
Although theorists from a variety of conceptual backgrounds, both within
and without psychology, have speculated on the nature of counterfactu-
als, this volume focuses on the efforts of experimental social psychologists.
As such, the chapters included here reflect the dominant theoretical
concerns of social psychology, such as an emphasis on 1) construal and
interpretation rather than on the objective truth value of counterfactual
propositions, on 2) the roles of motivation and processing goals in
determining counterfactual effects, and on 3) the wide-ranging impact of
situational influences on counterfactual thought processes. Although this
volume might be said to have grown directly out of the symposium
Counterfactual Research: Current Issues and Recent Research, chaired by us
and held at the 1993 convention of the American Psychological Associa
PREFACE ix
tion in Toronto, we must confess that the two projects evolved in tandem.
The list of contributors to this volume was taking shape even as Tom
Gilovich, Faith Gleicher, Keith Markman, Neal Roese, and Jim Sherman
were making their presentations at that symposium. By the summer of
1994, final drafts of the chapters had all been received.
This volume's overarching emphasis on current theory is illustrated
in the lead chapter by Roese and Olson. Our goal in this chapter is to
provide a comprehensive and critical overview of counterfactual research
as it has been conducted by social psychologists. We trace threads of
counterfactual ideas through philosophical, cognitive psychological, and
developmental psychological work, then examine in detail the conclusions
derived from the social psychological approach. We attempt to impose
order on various and often disparate findings with a two-stage motiva
tional model of counterfactual generation, a model we hope will eventu
ally inform and clarify future research endeavors. In chapter 2, E. Seelau,
S. Seelau, Wells, and Windschitl examine some of the basic rules that
constrain counterfactual generation. If pressed, people can imagine vir
tually anything, yet their spontaneous thoughts of "what if" and "if only"
tend to be remarkably disciplined, constrained to a much more finite set
of possibilities. E. Seelau et al. discuss three main classes of constraints:
those based on basic laws of the workings of the universe, those based
on availability of information in memory, and those based on higher-order
goals and purposes. Not only are some counterfactual possibilities more
frequently generated than others across individuals, but, as illustrated in
chapter 3, some counterfactuals are more commonly considered than
others by certain kinds of individuals. In this chapter, Kasimatis and
Wells review work on individual differences in counterfactual thinking,
exploring interpersonal variation not only in terms of mere quantity but
also in terms of qualitative differences in such thought processes. In
chapter 4, Dunning and Madey examine mechanisms of comparative
reasoning. These authors contend that the pairwise contrast between a
factual and counterfactual event is crucially influenced by framing. For
example, which of the two comparison targets is made the focus of
assessment can substantially influence judgments.
The next three chapters reflect an ongoing concern with the global
consequences of counterfactual thinking. McMullen, Markman, and
Gavanski (chapter 5) examine some of the benefits of counterfactual
thinking, using evidence from a cunning set of "gambling" experiments.
Feelings of control and empowerment are just one of several consequences
they discuss. Roese and Olson continue this approach in chapter 6. Here
we describe the results of several experiments that document how specific
content-based subtypes of counterfactual thoughts may be beneficial to the
individual both emotionally and in terms of future preparativeness. In
