Counterfactuals are thoughts about alternatives to past events, that is, thoughts of what might have been. This article provides an updated account of the functional theory of counterfactual ...thinking, suggesting that such thoughts are best explained in terms of their role in behavior regulation and performance improvement. The article reviews a wide range of cognitive experiments indicating that counterfactual thoughts may influence behavior by either of two routes: a content-specific pathway (which involves specific informational effects on behavioral intentions, which then influence behavior) and a content-neutral pathway (which involves indirect effects via affect, mind-sets, or motivation). The functional theory is particularly useful in organizing recent findings regarding counterfactual thinking and mental health. The article concludes by considering the connections to other theoretical conceptions, especially recent advances in goal cognition.
Hindsight Bias Roese, Neal J.; Vohs, Kathleen D.
Perspectives on psychological science,
09/2012, Letnik:
7, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they "knew it all along," that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight ...bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events' objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one's own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.
When consumers anticipate feeling embarrassed by a purchase, they often purchase additional products to mitigate the threat. The current research demonstrates that nonembarrassing additional ...purchases do not necessarily attenuate anticipated embarrassment but may, paradoxically, exacerbate it instead. Results further show that when additional purchases do attenuate anticipated embarrassment, they can do so independently of their effect on the salience of the embarrassing product. Five experiments provide converging evidence that additional purchases attenuate (vs. exacerbate) anticipated embarrassment to the extent that they are perceived to counterbalance (vs. complement) the undesired identity communicated during purchase. These results contrast with the traditional explanation for this strategy, which holds that additional purchases mitigate embarrassment because they compete with the embarrassing product for observers’ attention. This research contributes to a more precise understanding of consumer coping and impression management by identifying shopping basket composition as an important factor in purchase embarrassment.
The Maximizing Mind-Set Ma, Jingjing; Roese, Neal J.
The Journal of consumer research,
06/2014, Letnik:
41, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Getting the best has been advocated as an ideal in almost every domain of life. We propose that maximizing constitutes a mind-set that may be situationally activated and has cross-domain ...consequences. Specifically, we show that the maximizing mind-set amplifies regret and dissatisfaction, increases the likelihood of returning and switching products, and affects sensory experiences such as taste. The effect of the maximizing mind-set occurs only when consumers learn that they do not get the best but not when they do in fact get the best. We validate our conception of the maximizing mind-set by demonstrating its embrace of underlying processes of comparisons and goals.
Counterfactual thoughts center on how the past could have been different. Such thoughts may be differentiated in terms of direction of comparison, such that upward counterfactuals focus on how the ...past could have been better, whereas downward counterfactuals focus on how the past could have been worse. A key question is how such past-oriented thoughts connect to future-oriented individual differences such as optimism. Ambiguities surround a series of past studies in which optimism predicted relatively greater downward counterfactual thinking. Our main study (N = 1150) and six supplementary studies (N = 1901) re-examined this link to reveal a different result, a weak relation between optimism and upward (rather than downward) counterfactual thinking. These results offer an important correction to the counterfactual literature and are informative for theory on individual differences in optimism.
What We Regret Most... and Why Roese, Neal J.; Summerville, Amy
Personality & social psychology bulletin,
09/2005, Letnik:
31, Številka:
9
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Which domains in life produce the greatest potential for regret, and what features of those life domains explain why? Using archival and laboratory evidence, the authors show that greater perceived ...opportunity within life domains evokes more intense regret. This pattern is consistent with previous publications demonstrating greater regret stemming from high rather than low opportunity or choice. A meta-analysis of 11 regret ranking studies revealed that the top six biggest regrets in life center on (in descending order) education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Study Set 2 provided new laboratory evidence that directly linked the regret ranking to perceived opportunity. Study Set 3 ruled out an alternative interpretation involving framing effects. Overall, these findings show that people’s biggest regrets are a reflection of where in life they see their largest opportunities; that is, where they see tangible prospects for change, growth, and renewal.
People selectively enforce their moral principles, excusing wrongdoing when it suits them. We identify an underappreciated source of this moral inconsistency: the ability to imagine counterfactuals, ...or alternatives to reality. Counterfactual thinking offers three sources of flexibility that people exploit to justify preferred moral conclusions: People can (a) generate counterfactuals with different content (e.g., consider how things could have been better or worse), (b) think about this content using different comparison processes (i.e., focus on how it is similar to or different than reality), and (c) give the result of these processes different weights (i.e., allow counterfactuals more or less influence on moral judgments). These sources of flexibility help people license unethical behavior and can fuel political conflict. Motivated reasoning may be less constrained by facts than previously assumed; people’s capacity to condemn and condone whom they wish may be limited only by their imaginations.
Four studies examine how political partisanship qualifies previously documented regularities in people's counterfactual thinking (
= 1186 Democrats and Republicans). First, whereas prior work finds ...that people generally prefer to think about how things could have been better instead of worse (i.e. entertain counterfactuals in an upward versus downward direction), studies 1a-2 find that partisans are more likely to generate and endorse counterfactuals in whichever direction best aligns with their political views. Second, previous research finds that the closer someone comes to causing a negative event, the more blame that person receives; study 3 finds that this effect is more pronounced among partisans who oppose (versus support) a leader who 'almost' caused a negative event. Thus, partisan reasoning may influence which alternatives to reality people will find most plausible, will be most likely to imagine spontaneously, and will view as sufficient grounds for blame. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.
Regulatory focus theory distinguishes between two independent structures of strategic inclination, promotion versus prevention. However, the theory implies two potentially independent definitions of ...these inclinations, the self-guide versus the reference-point definitions. Two scales (the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire Higgins, E. T., Friedman, R. S., Harlow, R. E., Idson, L. C., Ayduk, O. N., & Taylor, A. (2001). Achievement orientations from subjective histories of success: Promotion pride versus prevention pride.
European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 3–23 and the General Regulatory Focus Measure Lockwood, P., Jordan, C. H., & Kunda, Z. (2002). Motivation by positive and negative role models: Regulatory focus determines who will best inspire us.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 854–864) have been widely used to measure dispositional regulatory focus. We suggest that these two scales align respectively with the two definitions, and find that the two scales are largely uncorrelated. Both conceptual and methodological implications are discussed.
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