Preparative Counterfactual Thinking

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Decision Making: How People Question Decisions Beforehand In everyday life, people constantly question the decisions that they make in order to weigh the possible consequences and benefits. In some situations, people do this with great scrutiny or perhaps with not much thought applied. This process of alternate thought is termed ‘counterfactual thinking.’ According to Roese (1994), two types of counterfactual thoughts are preparative and affective counterfactual thoughts. Preparative counterfactual thoughts serve the purpose of enhancing a person’s learning experience. Affective counterfactual thoughts help people to feel more positive about a situation that would be considered negative. Affective counterfactual thinking may give a person a peace of mind regarding a situation, however it won't actually make the situation any better. Free will beliefs probably won’t allow people to think about the ways that situations or things could be different than they are. Free will beliefs may be able to foretell the probability of someone thinking of preparative counterfactual thoughts, more specifically upward, additive and self-related counterfactuals. Free will is generally known as a person’s way of deciding how to act and preparative counterfactuals are used for decisions on how to act in the future (Pronin & …show more content…

The researchers manipulated or measured free will belief and looked at the correlation between these beliefs and the quantity and nature of counterfactual thoughts. The authors thought that a high belief in free will would correlate to more counterfactual thoughts overall, than free will disbelief. A person remembering their negative and unpleasant moments would probably feel a sense negativity, however this type of reminiscing could help their

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