Counterfactual potency

Counterfactual thoughts typically take the form of implied or explicit if-then statements. We propose that the multiplicative combination of "if likelihood" (the degree to which the antecedent condition of the counterfactual is perceived to be likely) and "then likelihood" (the perceived conditional likelihood of the outcome of the counterfactual, given the antecedent condition) determine the strength and impact of counterfactuals. This construct, termed counterfactual potency, is a reliable predictor of the degree of influence of counterfactual thinking upon judgments of regret, causation, and responsibility. Through 4 studies, we demonstrate the predictive power of this construct in a variety of contexts and show that it plays a causal role in determining the strength of the effects of counterfactual thought. Implications of counterfactual potency as a central factor of counterfactual influence are discussed.     

The expectation of guilt and resistance to temptation

Children's expectations about the emotions that surround a moral transgression were examined. In experiment 1, children aged 4-6 years and 8-9 years listened to a story about a child who resisted but then yielded to the temptation to take a sweet without permission. In line with earlier findings (Nunner-Winkler and Sodian, 1988), older children were more likely than younger children to expect the wrongdoer to feel pleased at resisting, but to feel bad after yielding to, temptation. In experiment 2, the relation between expectations of emotion and actual resistance to temptation was studied. Children aged 5-6 years again made judgements about a story character who eventually yielded to temptation. Their own resistance to temptation was assessed by means of a cheating task: children were given an opportunity to cheat by peeking during the experimenter's absence. Children who did not peek were more likely to attribute morally oriented feelings to the story protagonist. The results suggest that children who readily anticipate the emotional consequences of wrongdoing are more likely to resist the temptation to transgress.     

Missed opportunities: Psychological ramifications of counterfactual thought in midlife women

Counterfactual thinking entails the process of imagining alternatives to reality—what might have been. The present study examines the frequency, content, and emotional and cognitive concomitants of counterfactual thinking about past missed opportunities in midlife women. At age 43, nearly two-thirds of the sample of educated adult women reported having missed certain opportunities at some time in their lives. Most of the counterfactual thoughts concerned missed opportunities for greater challenge in work. Emotional distress at age 33 did not predict later counterfactual thought. Instead, counterfactual thinking at age 43 was associated with concurrent emotional distress. However, acknowledging counterfactual thinking about the past was also associated with envisioning ways to change things for the better in the future. This suggests the possibility that the negative appraisal often entailed in counterfactual thinking may be associated with emotional distress in the short run but with motivational benefits in the long run, at least for middle-aged women.     

Young children with a positive reputation to maintain are less likely to cheat

The present study examined whether having a positive reputation to maintain makes young children less likely to cheat. Cheating was assessed through a temptation resistance paradigm in which participants were instructed not to cheat in a guessing game. Across three studies (total N = 361), preschool‐aged participants were randomly assigned to either a reputation condition, in which an experimenter told them that she had learned of their positive reputation from classmates, or to a control condition in which they received no such information. By age 5, children in the reputation condition cheated less often than those in the control condition even though nobody was watching and choosing not to cheat conflicted with their personal interest. These findings are the first to show that informing children that they have a positive reputation to maintain can influence their moral behavior.     

Telling young children they have a reputation for being smart promotes cheating

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3‐ and 5‐year‐old children (total N = 323) assessed this possibility. In Study 1, participants were assigned to one of three conditions: a smart reputation condition in which they were told they have a reputation for being smart, an irrelevant reputation control condition, or a no reputation control condition. Children in the smart reputation condition were significantly more likely to cheat than their counterparts in either control condition. Study 2 confirmed that reputational concerns are indeed a fundamental part of our smart reputation effect. These results suggest that children as young as 3 years of age are able to use reputational cues to guide their behavior, and that telling young children they have a positive reputation for being smart can have negative consequences.     

Trait self-control and the avoidance of temptation

High trait self-control has been traditionally described as a keen ability to resist temptation. The present research suggests that high trait self-control is linked to avoiding, rather than merely resisting, temptation. People high in trait self-control reported engaging in behaviors thought to minimize (or avoid) temptation to a greater extent than people low in trait self-control (Study 1). People high in trait self-control were more likely than those low in trait self-control to choose to work in a distraction-free environment rather than in a distracting, yet appealing, one (Studies 2 and 3).     

Why did he do it? attribution of obedience and the phenomenon of dispositional bias

Two studies are reported which demonstrate the influence of perceptual or ‘perspective’ variables in mediating attribution processes. In both studies subjects first observed a re-enactment of Milgram's (1963) experiment of obedience in which a ‘teacher’ obeys an experimenter's request to deliver dangerously high levels of shock. They were then asked to make judgements concerning the magnitude of situational forces acting upon the teacher and also to make inferences about his personality dispositions. Study I showed that passage of time can lead observers to assume more situational control when they were required to think and write about the witnessed re-enactment of the Milgram situation compared with observers who had no time to contemplate or who were prevented from doing so. Study II did not support the notion that focus of attribution is a simple function of what one pays attention to, or a function of the differing perspectives which actors and observers employ. Both of these results seriously challenge Jones and Nisbett's (1972) contention that the differences in attribution tendencies between actors and observers arise from the difference in perspective, Moreover, considerable evidence suggests that changes in situational and dispositional attributions may not follow a simple ‘zero-sum’ model, and that subjects seem to be unwilling to treat the two sources of control as if they were inversely correlated.     

Too tired to tell the truth: Self-control resource depletion and dishonesty

The opportunity to profit from dishonesty evokes a motivational conflict between the temptation to cheat for selfish gain and the desire to act in a socially appropriate manner. Honesty may depend on self-control given that self-control is the capacity that enables people to override antisocial selfish responses in favor of socially desirable responses. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that dishonesty would increase when people’s self-control resources were depleted by an initial act of self-control. Depleted participants misrepresented their performance for monetary gain to a greater extent than did non-depleted participants (Experiment 1). Perhaps more troubling, depleted participants were more likely than non-depleted participants to expose themselves to the temptation to cheat, thereby aggravating the effects of depletion on cheating (Experiment 2). Results indicate that dishonesty increases when people’s capacity to exert self-control is impaired, and that people may be particularly vulnerable to this effect because they do not predict it.     

Counterfactuals,the National Economy,and Voting Choice

Previous research has shown that counterfactual thinking (“if only…”) is related to event explanation, blame assignment, and future decisions. Using data from a large-scale electoral panel survey (ITANES), we investigated the association between pre-election counterfactual thoughts on the national economy and subsequent voting choice. Results revealed that voters focused counterfactuals on the government and other political or economic actors but also, and more frequently, on unspecified or reified actors. Whereas counterfactuals focused on the government were associated with voting for the challenger, counterfactuals focused on political or economic actors or on reified actors were associated with voting for the incumbent. These associations were even stronger when counterfactuals had a subtractive (“if only X had not…”) rather than an additive (“if only X had…”) structure. The inclusion of the targets of the counterfactuals added significantly to the predictive value of a model of voting choice based on voters’ evaluation of the national economy.     

Thinking within the box: The relational processing style elicited by counterfactual mind-sets

By comparing reality to what might have been, counterfactuals promote a relational processing style characterized by a tendency to consider relationships and associations among a set of stimuli. As such, counterfactual mind-sets were expected to improve performance on tasks involving the consideration of relationships and associations but to impair performance on tasks requiring novel ideas that are uninfluenced by salient associations. The authors conducted several experiments to test this hypothesis. In Experiments 1a and 1b, the authors determined that counterfactual mind-sets increase mental states and preferences for thinking styles consistent with relational thought. Experiment 2 demonstrated a facilitative effect of counterfactual mind-sets on an analytic task involving logical relationships; Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that counterfactual mind-sets structure thought and imagination around salient associations and therefore impaired performance on creative generation tasks. In Experiment 5, the authors demonstrated that the detrimental effect of counterfactual mind-sets is limited to creative tasks involving novel idea generation; in a creative association task involving the consideration of relationships between task stimuli, counterfactual mind-sets improved performance.     

Type A behavior pattern and the judgment of control

We investigated the control judgments of Type A and B actors and observers after five tasks in which actual response-outcome contingency and success were varied systematically. Results indicated that, overall, actors provided higher control judgments than did observers, and both actual contingency and success influenced judged control. Type A and B actors did not differ in their self-perceptions of control but observers judged the Type A actors to have exerted more control than the Type B actors, primarily on positive contingency tasks. These findings suggest that Type As, because of their more active, dynamic style, may be credited by observers with more control or competence than is warranted. By contrast, the more relaxed style of the Type B may lead to lower than warranted evaluations of control or competence. Lastly, Type As were found to learn the contingencies better than Type Bs with important implications for the actual exercise of control.     

If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension

Propositional truth-value can be a defining feature of a sentence's relevance to the unfolding discourse, and establishing propositional truth-value in context can be key to successful interpretation. In the current study, we investigate its role in the comprehension of counterfactual conditionals, which describe imaginary consequences of hypothetical events, and are thought to require keeping in mind both what is true and what is false. Pre-stored real-world knowledge may therefore intrude upon and delay counterfactual comprehension, which is predicted by some accounts of discourse comprehension, and has been observed during online comprehension. The impact of propositional truth-value may thus be delayed in counterfactual conditionals, as also claimed for sentences containing other types of logical operators (e.g., negation, scalar quantifiers). In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment, we investigated the impact of propositional truth-value when described consequences are both true and predictable given the counterfactual premise. False words elicited larger N400 ERPs than true words, in negated counterfactual sentences (e.g., "If N.A.S.A. had not developed its Apollo Project, the first country to land on the moon would have been Russia/America") and real-world sentences (e.g., "Because N.A.S.A. developed its Apollo Project, the first country to land on the moon was America/Russia") alike. These indistinguishable N400 effects of propositional truth-value, elicited by opposite word pairs, argue against disruptions by real-world knowledge during counterfactual comprehension, and suggest that incoming words are mapped onto the counterfactual context without any delay. Thus, provided a sufficiently constraining context, propositional truth-value rapidly impacts ongoing semantic processing, be the proposition factual or counterfactual.     

Emotional responses to behavioral economic incentives for health behavior change

Many people aim to change their lifestyle, but have trouble acting on their intentions. Behavioral economic incentives and related emotions can support commitment to personal health goals, but the related emotions remain unexplored. In a regret lottery, winners who do not attain their health goals do not get their prize but receive feedback on what their forgone earnings would have been. This counterfactual feedback should provoke anticipated regret and increase commitment to health goals. We explored which emotions were actually expected upon missing out on a prize due to unsuccessful weight loss and which incentive-characteristics influence their likelihood and intensity. Participants reported their expected emotional response after missing out on a prize in one of 12 randomly presented incentive-scenarios, which varied in incentive type, incentive size and deadline distance. Participants primarily reported feeling disappointment, followed by regret. Regret was expected most when losing a lottery prize (vs. a fixed incentive) and intensified with prize size. Multiple features of the participant and the lottery incentive increase the occurrence and intensity of regret. As such, our findings can be helpful in designing behavioral economic incentives that leverage emotions to support health behavior change.     

On the counterfactual nature of envy: “It could have been me”

We examined whether counterfactual thinking influences the experience of envy. Counterfactual thinking refers to comparing the situation as it is to what it could have been, and these thought processes have been shown to lead to a variety of emotions. We predicted that for envy the counterfactual thought “it could have been me” would be important. In four studies we found a clear link between such counterfactual thoughts and the intensity of envy. Furthermore, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that a manipulation known to affect the extent of counterfactual thinking (the perception of being close to obtaining the desired outcome oneself), had an effect on the intensity of envy via counterfactual thoughts. This relationship between counterfactual thinking and the experience of envy allows for new predictions concerning situations under which envy is likely be more intense.     

Postdecisional counterfactual thinking by actors and readers

How do individuals think counterfactually about the outcomes of their decisions? Most previous studies have investigated how readers think about fictional stories, rather than how actors think about events they have actually experienced. We assumed that differences in individuals' roles (actor vs. reader) can make different information available, which in turn can affect counterfactual thinking. Hence, we predicted an effect of role on postdecisional counterfactual thinking. Reporting the results of eight studies, we show that readers undo the negative outcome of a story by undoing the protagonist's choice to tackle a given problem, rather than the protagonist's unsuccessful attempt to solve it. But actors who make the same choice and experience the same negative outcome as the protagonist undo this outcome by altering features of the problem. We also show that this effect does not depend on motivational factors. These results contradict current accounts of counterfactual thinking and demonstrate the necessity of investigating the counterfactual thoughts of individuals in varied roles.     

How the Eyes Tell Lies: Social Gaze During a Preference Task

Social attention is thought to require detecting the eyes of others and following their gaze. To be effective, observers must also be able to infer the person's thoughts and feelings about what he or she is looking at, but this has only rarely been investigated in laboratory studies. In this study, participants' eye movements were recorded while they chose which of four patterns they preferred. New observers were subsequently able to reliably guess the preference response by watching a replay of the fixations. Moreover, when asked to mislead the person guessing, participants changed their looking behavior and guessing success was reduced. In a second experiment, naïve participants could also guess the preference of the original observers but were unable to identify trials which were lies. These results confirm that people can spontaneously use the gaze of others to infer their judgments, but also that these inferences are open to deception.     

Hazards mean luck: Counterfactual thinking in reports of dangerous situations and careless behavior

It has been shown (Teigen, 1995) that experiences of "luck" in daily life are dependent upon the existence a worse and close hypothetical (counterfactual) outcome, rather than upon a positive evaluation of what actually happened. The present investigation focuses on the inverse relationship, namely whether a situation with a negative outcome close at hand will be perceived as lucky. To test this hypothesis, students were asked to describe dangerous situations (Experiment 1) and examples of careless behavior (Experiment 3) from their own lives, which subsequently were rated by the actors and by peer groups for good and bad luck, attractiveness, and for closeness and attractiveness of the counterfactual outcome. Dangerous situations and episodes involving careless behavior were generally regarded as more lucky than unlucky. Furthermore, degree of good luck was positively correlated with degree of dangerousness and with degree of carelessness. Luck was related to closeness, aversiveness, and (in Experiment 2) to estimated probability of the counterfactual outcome. It is concluded that luck is primarily determined by negative outcomes that did not happen, and thus a frequent by-product of risk taking and risk exposure.     

Judgments of Decision Effectiveness: Actor-Observer Differences in Overconfidence

Subjects playing the role of psychiatrists (actors) engaged in a simulated medical decision-making task in which they attempted to bring the value of a patient indicator variable into a desired range. For each treatment recommended by the actor, both the actor and an observer subject playing the role of a nurse assessed the probability that the treatment would be effective. Both actors and observers were overconfident. Actors were more confident in their treatment recommendations than were observers, but this difference was eliminated when observers were given the opportunity to offer their own alternative recommendation. Under the latter circumstances, actors and observers were equally confident in the actors' decisions but observers were more confident than actors in the observers' decisions. These findings suggest that while control over the outcome of the decision has little influence on actor-observer differences in confidence, feedback regarding this outcome plays a crucial role.     

Focus of attention and causal attributions of actors and observers

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that actors' and observers' causal attributions are a function of their focus of attention. In the presence of observer-subjects, actor-subjects made a choice among several art works in a supposed decision-making study. The experiment was a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design with the factors (1) source of attribution (actors, observers); (2) camera (actor videotaped, actor not videotaped); and (3) situational stability (stable, dynamic environment). As predicted by the focus of attention-causal attribution notion, it was found that actors attributed more causality to the situation than observers under normal circumstances, when the camera was not operative, but that videotaping the actor reversed the usual actor-observer pattern such that actors attributed less causality to the situation than did observers. Further, when the environment was stable, actors attributed more causality to the situation in the no camera condition than in the camera condition, while observers attributed less to the situation in the no camera conditions than in the camera conditions. Additionally, both actors and observers attributed more causality to the situation when the environment was dynamic than when the environment was stable.     

A cheat in our midst: How people evaluate and respond to fellow group members who cheat

Having a group cheat within a group can violate group trust and reduce the benefits gained from group membership. However, group members will sometimes cheat to get an advantage over other in‐group members. In two experiments, the present research investigated how group members evaluate and respond to fellow group members who cheat, and whether group prototypicality or evaluators’ group identification moderate evaluations and behavioral recommendations toward group cheats. In Study 1 (N = 146 undergraduate students), group members evaluated group cheats more negatively than a comparable group deviant. However, highly identified group members would spare a cheat who had high group prototypicality. In Study 2 (N = 227 undergraduate students), highly identified group members rated a one‐time cheat with high prototypicality more favorably than a one‐time cheat with low prototypicality. However, prototypicality did not moderate evaluations toward a multiple time group cheat. In both studies, target evaluations were associated with changes in behavioral recommendations. Overall, results indicate a pattern similar to research on transgression or deviance credit: having group prototypicality can save a group cheat from an initial negative evaluation from highly identified group members, but prototypicality does not buffer against negative evaluations toward multiple time group cheaters.