Effects Of Counterfactual Thinking

750 Words2 Pages

The thought process of counterfactual thinking
Maya German
Middle Georgia State University

Abstract Counterfactual thinking is thoughts of an event of the past that could have had a better outcome and didn’t happen. This type of thinking helps people escape negative outcomes. It also helps us improve in our actions by making better choices. Counterfactual thoughts are “what if” and “what might have been” that happen in our thought process after negative moments. An experiment has been conducted to test the effects of counterfactual thinking.

Introduction

Everyday humans experience a “what if” situation. Whether it’s eating breakfast, waking up early for school, or even studying for class. According …show more content…

To explain this, as we learn from our “what if” moments we make better decisions for the future. For example, a student may question themselves what if I had studied two weeks before the test, maybe I would have passed. Counterfactual thoughts are emotional based situations, where people think about what could have been done differently in a situation whether they are happy, sad, or nervous. Counterfactual thinking requires the human mind to create alternatives to moments in life that have already happened. Our thoughts are counter to the fact, which often leads us into questioning our own actions to try to make previous situations better for future occurrences. (BOOK) According to _____, Our attributions influence our emotional reactions to events and therefore our counterfactual thoughts do as well. If we know better, we will do better. For example, If Andrea failed her big exam because she decided to go out the weekend before the test and got arrested for drunk driving, Andrea wouldn’t have much time to study because she spent the night in jail. She then may come up with counterfactual scenarios (e.g., if only I had called an Uber to drive me …show more content…

Normal events group (M=32.7, SD=12.36), p<.05). Student that cheated F (1,72) = 4.35, p=.098.

Discussion
The purpose of this study was to compare whether a positive or negative outcome would get more counterfactual thoughts. We hypothesized that participants would come up with more counterfactual thoughts to a negative outcome (Good student that studied, but failed the exam). There was no correlation found in the variables, but the number of counterfactuals was the dependent variable. The good student vs. bad student were the two confounds in the experiment. A confound is anything that is systematically different between conditions other than one thing that should be changed at a time (basically changing two things at a time).
All the main effects were not significant even with limitations. So overall there was no effect whether the student was described as a good or bad student in terms of average number of counterfactuals listed across different conditions listed. They were statistically similar but not reliably

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