Counterfactual thinking.

“This psychological process of comparing the obtained outcome with other possible outcomes has become known as counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1997).”

“Counterfactual thoughts arise when they instruct future behavior (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007; Epstude & Roese, 2008; Roese, 1997).”

“Drawing onBlau’s (1964)discussion of expectations and research on counterfactual thinking and attributional searches (Roese, 1997; Wong & Weiner, 1981), we predicted that explanations would have the most positive effects following outcomes that were both unfavorable and unexpected.”

“For example, negative affect causes counterfactual thought (Roese, 1997); perhaps the cognitive dissonance experienced when facts contradict an appealing falsehood triggers thoughts about how the falsehood could have been true.”

“The second part of this is known as ‘counterfactual reasoning’, because, although it is valid to think this way, it is essentially hypothetical, being contrary to what actually happened (Roese 1997).”

“Meanwhile, humans often lack extensive experience with joint access to visual experience and accompanying language instructions for navigating novel or unfamiliar environments, yet the human mind can navigate environments despite this data scarcity by incorporating mechanisms such as counterfactual reasoning [30] and…”

“Further support for this view comes from studies on another kind of hypothetical thought which, up until very recently, had not received much attention in the cognitive neuroscience of mental simulation: counterfactual thinking, our tendency to think about alternative ways in which things might have occurred in the pa…”

“Previous investigations of counterfactual thinking have found that individuals tend to alter exceptional rather than normal events, actions rather than inactions, and controllable rather than uncontrollable events (Roese, 1997), and also prefer to make minimal alterations (Byrne, 2005).”

“These thoughts of “what might have been” compare an actual outcome to a hypothetical outcome (Roese, 1997).”

“The perception of normality, whether a behavior is normal or abnormal, affects feelings of regret, but what is normal? Normal can be evaluated using several types of normality (Koonce, Miller, & Winchel, 2015), most notably – (1) the extent to which a behavior is similar to past behavior (sometimes referred to as intr…”

“Counterfactual thinking [23] is the act of considering past events that did not happen.”

“making process [18], but also in the interaction between users and machines [48].”

“This approach is consistent with a large literature indicating a crucial role for counterfactual representation in causal judgment (Byrne, 2002, 2016; Roese, 1997; Walsh & Sloman, 2011; Wells & Gavanski, 1989), especially when assigning causal responsibility to intentional actions (Lombrozo, 2010).”

“”), which is pervasive in everyday life (e.g., Byrne, 2002; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Roese, 1997), and considered one of the”

“Similarly, people almost never undo an outcome by replacing an event that does not involve a physical violations with one that does, for example, “If only Mr. Jones’s car had levitated moments before the accident...” (Roese, 1997).”

“We believe that this unexpected result might have been due to counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1997): In the rules of the game it was established that half of the members of an apartment complex had to agree with the participant moving in, that is, participants in the two rejections conditions only needed one positive…”

“The same dimensions seem to be relevant for which factors are mentioned in the antecedent of spontaneously generated counterfactuals (Byrne 2005; Roese 1997 provide reviews).”

“And when mental simulations draw from first principles, the resulting counterfactuals contrast reality (what is or what was) with a mental image of what might have been or what could be (Gaglio, 2004; Roese, 1997; Sanna, 2000).”

“The term that captures beliefs in the mutability of past events is counterfactual thinking (Mandel, Hilton, & Catellani, 2005; Roese, 1997), and by importing some insights from the counterfactual literature, new light may be shed on the nature of fate beliefs.”

“Although there is support for the idea that upward counterfactuals can amplify negative aVect (Roese, 1997), valence-based accounts do not explain how counterfactual thinking may diVerentially inXuence speciWc emotions.”

“The output of the classifier ( · ) is expressed as follows : The essence of the counterfactual based on causal inference is “counter to the facts” [54].”

“A prominent area of research in social psychology has explored the causes and consequences of this sort of counterfactual thinking (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Markman, Klein, & Suhr, 2009; Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995; Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995a, 1995b).”

“The probe items asked participants to engage in counterfactual thinking [14]; to imagine another reality, a reality where they had resources or lacked them, or where others recommended screening or did not.”

“Experiences of moral error are highly aversive, compelling regret and negative self-focused attention (Roese, 1997).”

“Counterfactual thinking, more broadly, is a cognitive tool to imagine how things might have turned out better (Byrne, 2005, 2016; Epstude & Roese, 2008; FitzGibbon et al., 2021; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Miller et al., 1990; Roese, 1997; Roese & Epstude, 2017; Summerville, 2011).”

“When we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have caused the bad outcome (Alicke, 2000; Cushman, Knobe, & SinnottArmstrong, 2008; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009; Knobe & Fraser, 2008), to have acted with knowledge and intent (Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010; Knobe, 2003), to…”

“This phenomenon — termed “counterfactual thinking” — has generated a great deal of interest over the past 25 years (for reviews, see Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1990; Roese, 1997; Mandel, Hilton, & Catellani, 2005).”

“Negative AMs were chosen since they are more likely to promote CFT (Roese, 1997), and we de fi ned them as events associated with negative valence at the time in which they occurred.”

“, & Roese, N. J. (2011). Regrets of the typical American:”

“…not only enables informational elements to be combined to construct novel future events, but also to construct novel counterfactual simulations of alternative histories using if-then conditionals (Barbey, Krueger, Grafman, & Bar, 2011; Roese, 1997; Schacter, Benoit, De Brigard, & Szpunar, 2015).”

“…between counterfactual reasoning and the feeling of regret (Gleicher et al., 1990; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Landman, 1987; Roese, 1997; Wells & Gavanski, 1989) as well as the cognitive processes and their neural bases that underlie regret (Camille et al., 2004; Coricelli…”

“Cognitive theorists hold that the human memory system is not so much designed to accurately reconstruct the past as it is to make sense of it in order to better anticipate the future (Roese, 1997; Wilson, Gilbert, & Centerbar, 2003).”

“In this view, to be plausible, counterfactual reasoning should re fl ect small deviations from reality, and, in fact, it has been demonstrated that counterfactuals are often used to renormalize deviations from normality (Roese 1997).”

“Sense of agency: Free will [31], being in charge of our own actions and destinies, and engage in counterfactual thinking [71, 28].”

“Such “if only…” counterfactual thinking can help to generate strategies for improving future decisions (Roese, 1997) but can also produce crippling levels of self-blame (Davis, Lehman, Silver, Wortman, & Ellard, 1996).”

“…the claim that these mental mutations, or ``counterfactual thoughts,'' in¯uence post-decisional a ective reactions (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Roese, 1997; Zeelenberg et al., 1998b), to our knowledge only one study tested whether these mutations are an important determinant of the actor-e…”

“19 A fruitful line of future research is to consider principles of counterfactual or hypothetical thinking observed in other domains, whether hypothetical reasoning about the physical world, or about individual behavior (Byrne, 2005; Roese, 1997).”

“(For an introduction to the counterfactual thinking literature see, e.g., Mandel, Hilton, & Catellani, 2005; Roese, 1997.”

“Thinking about alternative possibilities for past or future events is central to human thinking [62].”

“…we hold onto the metacognitive capabilities of human beings, such as productivity, systematicity, compositionality and inferential coherence of mental thought [8], causal and counterfactual thinking [262], deductive reasoning [263], interpretability[6],[54],etc.,aswellastheirextensive,dailyuse.”

“The reasoning and social psychology literature provides wide evidence of the psychological functions of counterfactual thinking (see Byrne, 2002, 2005; Roese, 1997, 2005).”

“A large body of research has shown that some situations invite counterfactual thinking more than others (Gavanski & Wells, 1989; Girotto, Legrenzi, & Rizzo, 1991; Johnson, 1986; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Varey, 1990; Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1995; Meyers-Levy & Maheswaran, 1992; Miller & Gunas…”

“In the present study, participants could perceive the averted win as a loss and the averted loss as a win because of counterfactual comparison (Roese, 1997).”

“Regret was chosen as the emotion of interest for several reasons: a) it has relatively clear cognitive dimensions (Roese, 1997), b) it is found to be swayed by the justification of a decision (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982), and c) it is influenced by cognitive effort (Park, Hill, & Bonds-Raacke, 2015).”

“Counterfactual thoughts occur within a very narrow range constrained by historical events (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Roese, 1997).”

“The consequences of negative emotional experience, irrespective of the specific emotion triggered, include (1) a heightened awareness of the issues presented and increased knowledge of the consequences of personal behaviour, (2) a change in beliefs caused by the understanding that certain if-then rules of potential be…”

“…ability to consider counterfactual possibilities underlies the emotions of regret and relief (Beck et al., 2014; McCormack et al., 2016; O’Connor et al., 2012), and it has been argued that counterfactual reasoning is critical for learning, inference, and decision-making (Pearl, 2000; Roese, 1997).”

“A similar dilemma between short-term and long-term effects has been discussed in the closely related counterfactual thinking literature (e.g., Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995).”

“…to this appraisal is the process of counterfactual thinking (Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski, 1994), which occurs when individuals reflect on how a past event, particularly one that is non-normative, might have otherwise unfolded had some perceived causal factors been different (Roese, 1997).”

“More recently, Roese (1997) proposes two directions of counterfactual thinking: upward and downward.”

“, Mandel & Lehman, 1996), and on some accounts, the primary function of counterfactual reasoning is to elicit corrective thinking in response to negative episodes (Roese, 1997).”

“Despite the consistent finding that thoughts about what might have been can make us feel worse as we ponder what could have occurred to improve an outcome but did not (Roese, 1997), upward counterfactuals are generally viewed as being functional (Roese, 1997).”