Counterfactual thoughts identifying how a past performance could have been better (e.g., “If only I had studied for the exam, I would have gotten an A!”) have been shown to increase effort and performance on future tasks. The present work examines whether current self‐evaluation motives moderate this link between past and future behavior. In two studies, we demonstrate that the preparatory benefits of counterfactual thoughts are limited to situations in which individuals pursue a self‐improvement motive. When individuals are instead motivated by self‐protection concerns, counterfactuals can be used to excuse poor performance, undermining any desire to improve in the future. The behavioral consequences of counterfactual thoughts are therefore dependent upon active self‐evaluation motives. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Upward counterfactual thoughts identify how a prior outcome could have been better and have been shown to improve subsequent performance. Both the identification of corrective actions (content-specific effects) and the more general mobilization of effort as a result of negative affect (content-neutral effects) have been suggested to underlie performance benefits. The results of three experiments presented here indicate that counterfactual thoughts have broad benefits for performance, independent of their content and beyond the effects of planning. These benefits were consistently dependent upon the experience of negative affect, but were eliminated when negative affect could be (mis)attributed to an intervening task. This misattribution effect is consistent with the operation of a mood-as-input process in which affect informs judgments of goal progress. Overall, the findings suggest that the benefits of upward counterfactual thinking reflect more broad attempts to improve following a subjectively unsatisfactory performance.