What might have been: Counterfactual thought concerning personal decisions

Abstract

Counterfactual thinking entails the process of imagining alternatives to realitywhat might have been. The present study explores the incidence and content of counterfactual thinking about personal decisions in three samples of adults. The results indicate, first, that counterfactual thought occurs frequently among normal adults, with approximately half of each sample reporting that they would do something differently if they had their lives to live over. Secondly, there appear to be common themes to the counterfactuals reported in various real-life domains. For example, it is common to imagine states counter to the realities of having married early, having curtailed one's education, and having experienced unsatisfactory interpersonal relationships. In general, it appears that decisions and events that were unusual, that have proved less than ideal, or that have prematurely closed off important life options most often generate counterfactual thinking.The process of imagining alternatives to reality -what might have been -is sometimes referred to as counterfactual thought. Because of the inevitability of choice, misfortune, and conflict between choices, claims, or ways of life, counterfactual thought may be inevitable (Hampshire, 1983). The present study turns this presupposition into a set of empirical questions : How common is counterfactual thought? What sorts of matters are people most likely mentally to alter?The mental simulation of counterfactuals has been implicated in a variety of psychological processes, including causal reasoning (Dunning & Parpal, 1989 ;Gavanski & Wells, 1990;Goodman, 1973;Wells, Taylor & Turtle, 1987), emotional reactions to life events (Gleicher, Kost, Baker, Strathman, Richman & Sherman, 1990; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a, 6; Landman, 1987a, b; Landman, in press;Lehman, Wortman & Williams, 1987), and social perception (Miller,' Turnbull & McFarland, 1990). However, nearly all the research has been carried out in the laboratory with hypothetical events as stimuli. The extent to which people engage in counterfactual thinking in real life, and its nature, remain * Requests for reprints.

What We Regret Most... and Why

“…1 The sample consisted of adults of varying ages and occupations approached by graduate counseling students as part of a class project. Landman and Manis (1992) used the same measurement strategy in the following three samples: undergraduates, adult women who had contacted the University of Michigan Women's Center, and a collection of adults culled from a motor vehicle licensing database. DeGenova (1992) asked a representative sample of elderly residents of Lafayette, Indiana, what aspects of their lives they would change if they could; respondents gave ratings of desired change for 35 life domains.…”

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…The Hattiangadi et al (1995) data for example show that inactions outnumbered actions by more than four to one, and that does not include a category of "indeterminate regrets" (those coded as "both" or "neither") which in the studies reported in the thesis were on average three times more likely to be general than specific. It would not be surprising to find similar patterns in surveys asking people to say what they would do if they had their lives to live over (DeGenoa, 1992;Hattiangadi et al, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Landman & Manis, 1992;Landman et al, 1995) because as Kahneman (1995) has suggested, requests for regrets tend to elicit elaborative counterfactuals about how life might have been better, which are likely to involve big changes of a general nature. In temporal construal terms (Trope & Liberman, 2003) such requests might be interpreted as an invitation to consider personal goals at the superordinate level, which would necessarily elicit "bigger picture" construals of distant events.…”

“…Men and women think regret-related counterfactual thoughts with equal frequency (Landman & Manis, 1992), although sex differences have been found: women are more likely than men to report family and relationship regrets (Jokisaari, 2004) and within the domain of romantic relationships men are more likely than women to regret not having had more partners (Roese, Pennington, Janicki, Li & Kenrick, 2006). Regret is found in samples of young and old participants (Wrosch & Heckhausen 2002), in cross-cultural studies of American, Chinese, Japanese and Russian samples (Gilovich, Wang, Regan & Nishina, 2003) and in studies carried out independently in Turkey (Toktas, 2002),…”

“…These findings come from surveys and experimental studies involving both sexes, all age groups, and different methods of eliciting regret. Some studies asked people directly what they regretted in life (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994;Jokisaari, 2003) or which of life"s activities they most regretted not having pursued (Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002), while others asked people to say how they would do things differently if they could live life over again (DeGenoa, 1992;Hattiangadi, Medvec & Gilovich, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Landman & Manis, 1992;Landman, Vanderwater, Stewart & Malley, 1995). Lecci, Okun and Karoly, (1994) asked people about their unfulfilled goals, which were seen as proxies for regret.…”

Counterfactual Conditionals

“…Likewise, economists do make extensive use of counterfactual reasoning, mostly self-unconsciously though. For example, a vast literature is concerned with economic and financial decisions: If it is true that, normatively, von Neumann and Morgenstern's (1944) utility theory maintains its charm among decision theorists and economists, in a descriptive approach the role of counterfactuals in decision-making processes is highly recognized in regret theory (Bell, 1982(Bell, , 1985Sugden, 1982, 1986), which is gaining ground among cognitive psychologists (Zeelenberg et al, 1996;Zeelenberg and Beattie 1997;Tsiros, 1998); implications for marketing are also studied (McGill, 2000;Roese, 2000); further, the way counterfactuals affect economic and financial decisions is investigated (Lundberg and Frost, 1992;McConnell et al, 2000;Tsiros and Mittal, 2000), as well as their impact on a personal domain (Landman and Manis, 1992). Nevertheless, so far as I am aware, the role of counterfactual thought in the formulation of economic concepts has not yet been adequately recognized, let alone the epistemological implications on economic models (but see Sugden, 2000, for an interpretation of economic models as counterfactual worlds; see also Elster, 1978) and, in general, on decisionmaking processes.…”