As investigators of the world around us, we gain a more coherent and often more accurate understanding of events not only through memories, assigning causes for the outcomes that do happen, and forming impressions of those involved, but by also imagining alternative outcomes. In fact, one of the most remarkable properties of the mind afforded by the evolution of the human neocortex is the capacity to fantasize—to imagine events that have not happened and people who do not exist. Fantasy and science fiction writers such as J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame and Philip K. Dick, whose stories were the basis for films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, provide particularly vivid examples of this capacity because they imagine entire alternative universes.

Although most of us aren’t quite that creative, we all use our imaginations every day. Indeed, every thought we have of the future is a fantasy because it requires imagining something that does not yet exist and may never exist in the way we imagine it. And as we have seen from the work on memory reconstruction, every recall of an event from the past involves using one’s imagination to fill in the details: Not only is the future never exactly as we imagined it, but neither is the past!

A less obvious but equally important use of our imaginations is thinking about how things that happen a certain way could have turned out differently. These alternatives that run counter to what actually happened are known as counterfactuals. Just as assigning causal attributions helps us make sense of the world, so does our ability to think about alternative outcomes. Counterfactuals are so deeply ingrained in how we react to events that occur, they often affect us without our conscious awareness that they are doing so. In fact, the research we are about to present will demonstrate that counterfactual thoughts routinely influence how we judge and respond emotionally to events in our lives. However, we are also more likely to imagine counterfactual outcomes in some situations than in others. By examining these patterns of what counterfactual outcomes come easily to mind and when, research has revealed the important role that they play in our lives.

148

Consider the following story, based on Kahneman and Tversky (1982), which we’ll call Version A: Carmen always wanted to see the Acropolis, so after graduating from Temple University, using a travel agent, she arranged to fly from Philadelphia to Athens. She originally booked a flight in which she had to switch planes in Paris, with a three-hour layover before her flight from Paris to Athens. But a few days before her departure date, her travel agent e-mailed her that a direct flight from Philly to Athens had become available. Carmen figured, “Why not?” and so she switched to the direct flight. Unfortunately, her plane suffered engine failure and came down in the Mediterranean, leaving no survivors. How tragic would you judge this outcome for Carmen?

Well, if you are like the students who participated in Kahneman and Tversky’s classic study, you would say very tragic. But what if you read Version B? Carmen always wanted to see the Acropolis, so after graduating from Temple University, using a travel agent, she arranged to fly from Philadelphia to Athens. She booked a flight in which she had to switch planes in Paris, with a three-hour layover before her flight from Paris to Athens. Unfortunately, her plane from Paris to Athens suffered engine failure and came down in the Mediterranean, leaving no survivors.

How tragic does that seem? Well, Kahneman and Tversky’s research showed that people who read stories like Version B don’t think they are nearly as tragic as do those who read stories like Version A. Given that the outcome is really the same in both versions—Carmen died young without ever seeing the Acropolis—why does Version A seem more tragic? Kahneman and Tversky explained that it is because of the ease with which counterfactuals to what actually occurred could be generated. With Version A, it’s very easy to imagine a counterfactual in which Carmen made it safely to Greece—all she had to do was stick with her original flight plan! However, with Version B, no such obvious counterfactual is available. Rather, we would have to think for a while about ways that her tragic death might have been avoided. The general principle is that if something bad happens and the easier it is to imagine how the bad outcome could have been avoided, the more tragic and sad the event seems. And, as this example illustrates, it is generally easier mentally to undo bad outcomes if they are caused by an unusual action, such as switching flight plans.

So why is the close miss more agonizing? Kahneman and Tversky explained that the close miss is more upsetting because it is much easier to imagine a counterfactual in which you would have saved 5 minutes and made the flight than a scenario in which you would have saved 35 minutes and made it. For example, maybe you would have made it if when packing you had been a little faster in deciding which shoes to bring, or finding your guide to winning blackjack. In other words, it is easier to undo mentally the close miss than the not-so-close miss, just as it was easier to undo mentally the tragic fate of Carmen if she had changed flight plans than if she had simply taken the flight she had planned to take all along. Now you can explain why if your favorite basketball team loses on a last second buzzer-beater, it is more emotionally devastating than if the team loses by 15 points: It is much easier mentally to undo the close loss: “If only that last shot had clanked off the back of the rim.”

149

Counterfactual thinking has serious consequences in a variety of important areas of life. Consider the legal domain, where we’d like to think that jury decisions are based on a rational consideration of the facts at hand. In a series of studies, Miller and McFarland (1986) showed how this phenomenon of viewing the negative event that seems easier to undo as more unfortunate could influence trial outcomes. In one study they described a case in which a man was injured during a robbery. Half the participants read that the injury occurred in a store the victim went to regularly, whereas the other half were told it occurred in a store that the victim did not usually go to. All other details were identical, yet participants recommended over $100,000 more in compensation for the injury if the victim was injured at the store he rarely went to, because the unfortunate injury was easier mentally to undo in this version: “If only he had gone to the store where he usually shops!” To summarize, negative outcomes resulting from unusual actions or actions that were almost avoided are easier to undo mentally and therefore arouse stronger negative emotional reactions. Because our attention is drawn to causal factors that could have been undone more easily, perhaps we will know better how to avoid repeating our past mistakes in future situations.

A handy term for a counterfactual that is better than what actually happened is upward counterfactual, with “upward” denoting a better alternative than what happened. All the examples we have considered so far have involved the effects of upward counterfactuals. When bad things happen, people often generate such upward counterfactuals, and the more easily they do so, the worse the negative outcomes that actually occurred seems.

So far we have also focused on how we react emotionally to the fortunes of others, but we also generate upward counterfactuals for our own less than desired outcomes: “If only I had studied harder”; “If only I hadn’t had that last tequila shot”; “If only I had told her how much I care about her”; and so on. Upward counterfactuals generally make us feel worse about what actually happened. In particularly traumatic cases, for example, if a person causes a car accident by driving drunk, that individual may get caught in a recurring pattern of “if only I had” upward counterfactuals that fuel continued regret and guilt over the incident (Davis et al., 1995; Markman & Miller, 2006).

Interestingly though, studies (e.g., Gilovich & Medvec, 1994) have found that when older people look back over their lives, they tend not to regret actions they did but actions they didn’t do: “If I had only gone back to school and gotten that masters degree”; “If I had only had spent more quality time with my kids”; “If I had only asked Jessica out when I had the chance.” A broad survey of Americans found that their regrets about inaction are most commonly about decisions in the domain of one’s love life rather than in other aspects of their lives (Morrison & Roese, 2011). This may be something to keep in mind while you are young. But research suggests that one reason that we regret actions we didn’t do in our distant past is that we no longer recall the more concrete pressures and difficulties that kept us from taking that alternative course of action. For example, when Tom Gilovich and colleagues (1993) asked current Cornell students how much they would be affected by adding a challenging course to their workload, the students focused on the negative impact, such as lower grades, less sleep, and less time for socializing. However, when they asked Cornell alumni how adding a challenging course would have affected them in a typical semester back in the day, the alumni thought the negative impact would have been minor. Still, research on regret suggests that sometimes those fears and difficulties so salient in the present may not be so daunting as to warrant forgoing a path that offers greater rewards down the road.

150

If upward counterfactuals, whether contrasted with things we did or with things we didn’t do, tend to lead to such negative feelings about the past, why do people so commonly engage in them? Neal Roese and colleagues (e.g., Roese, 1994; Epstude & Roese, 2008) proposed that by making us consider what we could have done differently, upward counterfactuals serve an important function: They can provide insight into how to avoid a similar bad outcome in the future. Supporting this point, Roese found that students encouraged to think about how they could have done better on a past exam reported greater commitment to attending class and studying harder for future exams. Thus, although upward counterfactuals can make us feel worse about what transpired, they better prepare us to avoid similar ills in the future.

We often also generate downward counterfactuals, thoughts of alternatives that are worse than what actually happened. These counterfactuals don’t help us prepare better for the future, but they help us feel better about the past (Roese, 1994). By making salient possible outcomes that would have been worse than what actually happened, downward counterfactuals allow us to feel better about what happened. They have more of a consolation function. After a robbery, you might conclude that although they took your television, at least they didn’t get your laptop. When visiting a friend in the hospital who broke both her legs in a car accident, people often offer consoling comments such as, “You were lucky—you could have had spine damage and been paralyzed for life.”

It is worth considering how people use counterfactuals to reframe such bad events. While visiting Los Angeles once, a football player from one of our schools was shot in the leg by a random bullet. The bullet missed the bone, so the newspaper emphasized how lucky the player was, because if the bullet had hit the bone it would have caused more serious, potentially permanent damage. That makes sense, but the player would have been even luckier if he hadn’t been shot at all! So whether he was lucky or not depends on whether you focus on the upward counterfactual of not being shot at all, or on the downward counterfactual of the bullet’s shattering a bone. When people want to put a positive spin on an outcome, they choose the downward counterfactual.

Retail stores often take advantage of how making a downward counterfactual salient can place actual outcomes in a more positive light. Imagine that you come upon a pair of athletic shoes with a sign indicating a price of $60.00. You may think, “That’s not a bad price.” But what if the sign indicated that the shoes were reduced 50% from $120.00 to $60.00. The sign is essentially making salient a downward counterfactual— the shoes could have cost $120.00! Does this downward counterfactual make paying $60.00 for the shoes more enticing? Of course, this can be harder to pull off for some items than others. It might be tough to generate a downward counterfactual for the jazzed-up version of Lebron James’s new shoe, rumored to be close to $300.00 But when those puppies go on sale for a mere $199.00, they’ll fly off the shelves.

Upward and Downward Counterfactuals and Personal Accomplishments: The Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat

Counterfactuals also affect how we feel about our own achievements. Subjective, emotional reactions of satisfaction or regret are not determined so much by what you did or did not accomplish, but rather by the counterfactuals you generate about those outcomes. In one clever demonstration of this phenomenon, researchers asked participants to judge the happiness of athletes at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics who had won either the silver or the bronze medal by watching silent videotapes of them at the awards ceremony (Medvec et al., 1995). The silver medal, which means the person was the second best in the world at the event, is obviously a greater achievement than the bronze medal, which means the person was the third best in the world. However, on the basis of an analysis of which counterfactuals are most likely for silver- and bronze-medal winners, the researchers predicted that the bronze-medal winners would actually be happier than the silver-medal winners. They reasoned that for silver-medal winners, the most salient counterfactual is likely to be the upward counterfactual that “If only I had gone X seconds faster, or trained a little harder, I could have won the ultimate prize, the gold medal!” In contrast, bronze-medal winners are likely to focus on the downward counterfactual that “If I hadn’t edged out the fourth-place finisher, I would have gone home with no medal at all!” In support of this reasoning, Medvec and colleagues found that bronze-medal winners were rated as appearing happier on the awards stand than silver-medal winners. Furthermore, in televised interviews, bronze medalists were more likely to note that at least they received a medal, whereas the silver medalists were more likely to comment on how they could have done better.

151

Is It Better to Generate Upward or Downward Counterfactuals?

This work on counterfactual thinking illustrates how the human capacity for imagining “if only” alternatives to events that have already occurred plays a central role in our emotional reactions to those events. Now, in light of all this, you might be wondering, is it better to generate upward counterfactuals? Or is it better to generate downward counterfactuals? Well, that depends on a few factors. If you’re down in the dumps and just want to feel better about what happened, downward counterfactuals and imagining a worse outcome can improve how you feel. But that’s not always the most productive response. Sometimes we can learn a lot from that which bums us out. Indeed, if the outcome pertains to an event that is likely to reoccur in the future, upward counterfactuals can give you a game plan for improvement or avoiding the bad outcome. But it also depends on whether you’re able to exert any control over the outcome that you experienced or that you might face in the future (Roese, 1994). Say that you get into a car accident, because—shame on you—you were texting while driving. In this case, assuming you’re reasonably okay, it would be more productive to generate an upward counterfactual such as “If I only I had not been texting, I would not have hit the stop sign.” This teaches you to avoid texting while driving, and seeing as how you’re likely to be driving again, this is a good lesson to learn! But say you were attentively driving when someone ran a stop sign and nailed your rear fender. In this case the outcome is out of your control, and so you’re better off generating a downward counterfactual and thanking your lucky stars that it was just a fender bender and you’re all right.

In sum, counterfactuals, our processes of remembering, of forming impressions of others, and of generating causal attributions all have important implications for the way we feel toward the past and act in the future. This can help or hinder our efforts to regulate our actions to achieve our desired goals, a theme we will pick up, along with much of what we have discussed regarding perceiving others, in the next set of chapters, where we focus on the self.

CONNECT ONLINE:

Check out our videos and additional resources located at: www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/greenberg1e