"If only I'd studied harder, I wouldn't have flunked that exam." People often construct alternate realities such as this one in order to mentally undo actual events. There is a wide variety of research done in this area, termed counterfactual thinking. Two recent articles expanded on the existing literature, focusing on antecedents to counterfactual thinking (Sanna & Turley, 1996) and self-blame in counterfactuals (Davis, Lehman, Silver, Wortman, & Ellard).
Sanna and Turley (1996) sought to integrate several different aspects of counterfactual thinking. Specifically, they were interested in the effects of expectancy violation and outcome valence on spontaneous counterfactuals. Expectancy violation occurs when an event deviates drastically from what was expected. It was demonstrated in three studies that unexpected events elicited more counterfactuals than expected events. The authors suggested that this could be attributed to people attempting to better understand how or why these events might not have happened.
Outcome valence refers to either the success or failure of the event that elicited the counterfactual thoughts. Some researchers (e.g. Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993) have found that failures elicit more counterfactuals than successes. Sanna and Turley (1996) reasoned that perhaps people expect to succeed, so a failure is an expectancy violation. In that case, the antecedent to counterfactual thinking is expectancy violation and not outcome valence. In line with the previous literature, Sanna and Turley (!996) found that people indeed generated more counterfactuals overall after failure than after success. However, the most counterfactuals were generated in the unexpected failure condition, which lends credence to the idea that it is possibly expectancy violation, rather than outcome valence, that is influencing counterfactual thought. Clearly more research is needed in this area.
Perhaps a more fundamental question asked in this article is whether people engage in spontaneous counterfactual thinking at all. Previous research has generally asked participants to explicitly generate counterfactuals. Sanna and Turley (1996) did not prompt subjects for counterfactual thoughts; they merely instructed subjects to tell the story. They were able to demonstrate that people do in fact engage in counterfactual thinking spontaneously, which adds validity to the concept.
This is an excellent addition to the growing body of literature in the area of counterfactual thinking. It is an especially important contribution to demonstrate that people engage in counterfactual thinking spontaneously. Another recent article in the area focused on how counterfactual thinking relates to self-blame (Davis et.al., 1996). In this study, the participants had recently been victims of a spinal cord injury. Davis et.al (1996) found that the more time respondents spent thinking about counterfactuals (e.g. how the accident could have been avoided), the more they felt that they personally could have avoided it. This is related to Sanna and Turley=s (1996) research discussed earlier. More counterfactuals were generated in the unexpected failure condition than in any other condition. A spinal cord injury is certainly an unexpected, negative event, so it is unsurprising that people are generating many counterfactuals. It is interesting that the act of generating counterfactuals correlates with the feeling that one could have personally avoided the injury. The authors suggest that this may be an example of the counterfactual fallacy (Miller & Turnbull, 1990). If people can generate many counterfactuals in which the accident does not happen, then it is easy for them to imagine such a scenario. The subjects then confuse what might have been with what should have been. "In retrospect, actions that might not have been taken become actions that should not have been taken" (p. 565).
The authors are assuming that the direction of causality is from the counterfactual to self-blame, but it could be the other way around. In other words, they are suggesting that the ease with which counterfactuals spring to mind causes people to blame themselves for not avoiding the event. It might be, however, that people need to think of ways in which the accident could have been avoided, and so they force themselves to generate counterfactuals. It may not even be very easy to generate counterfactual thoughts; perhaps there are few ways in which the accident could have been avoided. Still, participants are able to imagine ways in which the outcome might have been different. It would be worthwhile to study this phenomenon under more controlled conditions in order or make statements of causality.
Taken together, these two articles add greatly to the counterfactual literature. Counterfactual thinking is beginning to be used as a tool to study other concepts, such as self-blame (Davis et.al.,1996). In addition, it is still an area of research in its own right (Sanna & Turley, 1996). I hope to see more studies in which counterfactual thinking is integrated in the study of other phenomenon; it can be helpful in merging topics. Counterfactual thinking seems to be an important aspect of our cognitive functioning.