Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.
Counterfactual thoughts include things that – in the present – could not have happened because they are dependent on events that did not occur in the past.
[2] A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change.
Downward counterfactuals are thoughts about how the situation could have been worse; and people tend to have a more positive view of the actual outcome.
[7] In the seventeenth century, the German philosopher Leibniz argued that there could be an infinite number of alternate worlds, so long as they were not in conflict with laws of logic.
[9][10][11] Ruth M.J. Byrne in The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (2005) proposed that the mental representations and cognitive processes that underlie the imagination of alternatives to reality are similar to those that underlie rational thought, including reasoning from counterfactual conditionals.
[4] Early research on counterfactual thinking took the perspective that these kinds of thoughts were indicative of poor coping skills, psychological error or bias, and were generally dysfunctional in nature.
[16] As research developed, a new wave of insight beginning in the 1990s began taking a functional perspective, believing that counterfactual thinking served as a largely beneficial behavioral regulator.
It is believed that humans tend to think of counterfactual ideas when there were exceptional circumstances that led to an event, and thus could have been avoided in the first place.
In the case of a death due to natural causes, parents tended to counterfactually think less over the course of time.
[1] One may wonder why we continue to think in counterfactual ways if these thoughts tend to make us feel guilty or negatively about an outcome.
The past cannot be changed, but similar situations may occur in the future, and thus we take our counterfactual thoughts as a learning experience.
[18][19] Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, and McMullen (1993) identified the repeatability of an event as an important factor in determining what function will be used.
For events that happen repeatedly (e.g., sports) there is an increased motivation to imagine alternative antecedents in order to prepare for a better future outcome.
For one-time events, however, the opportunity to improve future performance does not exist, so it is more likely that the person will try to alleviate disappointment by imagining how things could have been worse.
[16] Hence, counterfactual thinking motivates individuals to goal-oriented actions in order to attain their (failed) goal in the future.
Unlike the cognitive processes involved at individual level, abstract counterfactuals lead to an increase in group identification, which is positively correlated with collective action intention.
When thinking in this manner, people focus on ways that the situation could have turned out more positively: for example, "If only I had studied more, then I wouldn't have failed my test".
[16] As with many cognitive processes, research seeks to gain better insight into the functions and outcomes of how counterfactual thinking works.
They also examine the possible mechanism of manipulating social distance and the effect this could have on responding to negative events in either a self-improvement or self-enhancement motivations.
[21] Research by Scholl and Sassenberg (2014) looked to determine how perceived power in the situation can affect the counterfactual thought and process associated to understanding future directions and outlooks.
The research examined how manipulating the perceived power of the individual in the given circumstance can lead to different thoughts and reflections.
Their research "demonstrated that being powerless (vs. powerful) diminished self-focused counterfactual thinking by lowering sensed personal control."
[22] Kahneman and Miller (1986)[28] proposed the norm theory as a theoretical basis to describe the rationale for counterfactual thoughts.
Norm theory suggests that the ease of imagining a different outcome determines the counterfactual alternatives created.
[29] Kahneman and Miller (1986) also introduced the concept of mutability to describe the ease or difficulty of cognitively altering a given outcome.
[32] In short, the greater the number of alternative outcomes constructed, the more unexpected the event, and the stronger emotional reaction elicited.
Byrne (2005) outlined a set of cognitive principles that guide the possibilities that people think about when they imagine an alternative to reality.
For individuals experiencing severe depressive symptoms, perceptions of control are diminished by negative self-perceptions and low self-efficacy.
[43] Epstude and Roese (2008) propose that excessive counterfactual thoughts can lead people to worry more about their problems and increase distress.