Counterfactual thinking.

“In European policy circles, this is called the ‘counterfactual’ (EVALSED, 2012) – a term borrowed from psychology where it has a slightly different meaning, that is, a mental representation or image of an alternative trajectory, past or future (ROESE, 1997).”

“Previous literature has suggested that receiving a large price promotion is beneficial for both customers and retailers (Rothschild and Gaidis 1981; Cotton and Babb 1978).”

“When people then do not actualize the desired change, these prefactual thoughts tend to evolve into counterfactual thoughts—in other words, thoughts about “what could have been” if they would have realized the desired change (McCloy & Byrne, 2000; Roese, 1997).”

“In general, people are far more likely to seek reasons for their failures than for their successes (see Roese, 1997; Roese & Hur, 1997; Weiner, 1985).”

“The theoretical idea behind the finding that more rolls lead to more lying is that observing desired counterfactual outcomes (upward counterfactuals; Roese, 1997; Epstude & Roese, 2008; Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993), in the form of higher values appearing on non-relevant for pay rolls, changes the way…”

“Individuals who engage in upward counterfactual thinking often experience negative affect, whereas individuals who engage in downward counterfactual thinking often experience relief (Epstude & Roese, 2008; Roese, 1997).”

“However, we do not wish to underemphasize the theoretically important role that negative affect plays in activating these cognitions (Roese, 1997; Roese & Hur, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997) as substantiated by our structural equation model.”

“, the mental simulation of alternative outcomes) is an automatic response mainly to a negative event (Roese, 1997).”

“They compare and evaluate alternative states andpossible scenarios (Roese 1997), consider whether they should take responsibility for the fate and outcomes of their prospective interdependent other (Handgraaf et al.”

“Noting that counterfactual attributions provide a window with which to understand mental life (Roese, 1997) and involves explanatory dimensions shown to be important in alcohol prevention (e.”

“Counterfactuals furnish benchmarks against which actual events are fully comprehended, counterfactuals influence emotions both in magnitude and in kind, and counterfactuals influence a range of judgments, such as blame, likelihood, suspicion, and decision making (see Roese, 1997, for review).”

“Given that our data suggest that counterfactual thinking can serve as a detriment to learning, memory, and functional decision making, they run counter to the conclusions of other researchers who have endorsed the functional view of counterfactual thinking (Epstude & Roese, 2008; Kray et al., 2009; Markman et al., 199…”

“While this may be the case, as discussed in the cognition theory elsewhere (Landman et al., 1995; Roese, 1997), the reverse implication is pervasive in the entrepreneurial literature due to its importance with respect to the process of causal inference—efforts (Baron, 2000; Gaglio, 2004)).”

“Research demonstrates that thinking about how outcomes could have been better (the generation of upward counterfactuals – see Roese, 1997) is, indeed, linked to feelings of regret (Johnson, 1986; Landman, 1987).”

“…relevant approach is the one of providing the possibility of asking questions of “why” (Pearl, 2019), and this can be further extended to a so-called counterfactual questioning (“what would happen if”) (Guidotti, 2024; Metsch et al., 2024; Prosperi et al., 2020; Roese, 1997; Suffian et al., 2022).”

“Counterfactual thoughts are more likely to be generated after traumatic experiences (Taylor & Schneider, 1989) and goal failure (Roese, 1997; Byrne, 2002), with upward, self-referent counterfactuals most commonly generated following negative events (Dalgleish, 2004).”

“That conclusion dovetails well with the research on counterfactual thinking: People engage in counterfactual thinking by reflecting on bad actions and bad outcomes, and the benefits of such thinking are derived from thinking about how one could have acted differently (Roese, 1997).”

“Downward counterfactual thought, an analysis of what might have been worse compared to what has actually transpired, according to experts in psychology, is more challenging than its optimistic foil, upward counterfactual thought, where one reimagines a better outcome than the one that has transpired (Roese, 1997).”

“…the extant literature: (1) counterfactual theory that explains how missing an opportunity results in upward counterfactuals (“If only I had done it,” Roese 1997) that have been linked to feelings of regret (Gleicher et al. 1995; Zeelenberg et al. 1998) and, most importantly, can act as a key…”

“This counterfactual implied that the target was now getting something for less money than the default price (Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997).”

“Interestingly, research has shown that people’s counterfactual statements, which are often conditionals (“If only . . . , then . . .”), mention common, not rare, events (for a review, see Roese, 1997).”

“It predicts that people use a mental model of the situation to simulate what would have happened in different counterfactual contingencies (Chater & Oaksford, 2013; Gerstenberg, Peterson, et al., 2017; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Roese, 1997; Waskan, 2003).”

“For helpful overviews of the psychological dimensions of counterfactual thinking, see for examples Landman (1993) and Roese (1997).”

“Research on counterfactual thinking suggests that comparing current circumstances to a more positive alternate reality may motivate people to strive for this reality in the future (Roese, 1997).”

“Research on counterfactual thinking has provided confirmatory evidence for these predictions (cf. Roese, 1997).”

“Most people do not imagine how the world might be different after every event: they tend to think “if only” after something bad happens (Roese 1997).”

“Regret and Regret Theory According to psychology studies such as Kahneman and Tversky (1982), Kahneman and Miller (1986), Landman (1987b), Landman and Manis (1992), and Roese (1997), regret arises from counterfactual thinking.”

“Our design was based upon a “single-shot” game by Wohl and Enzle (2003) in which participants experiencing a near-loss were more likely to bet on a second risky prospect.”

“Counterfactual thinking in healthy individuals is associated with effective problem-solving, behavioral regulation, and performance improvement (Camille et al., 2004; Ursu & Carter, 2005; Roese, 1997).”

“…and factual thinking have similar effects on causal judgement, contrary to contemporary accounts of the causal judgement process that have emphasised the special role of counterfactual thinking (e.g., Branscombe et al., 1996; Lipe, 1991; Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995a; Wells & Gavanski, 1989).”

“This phenomenon is known as counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1994, 1997; Zeelenberg, van Dijk, van der Pligt, et al., 1998).”

“Upward and downward counterfactuals trade off immediate affect and preparation for the future, thus the net effect of CFT appears to be beneficial (Roese, 1997).”

“One of the processes involved in the persistence of belief in misinformation is counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1997), which allows individuals to uphold factually incorrect beliefs by mentally simulating the conditions under which those false facts could have been true (Effron, 2018).”

“• The first principle says that people are inclined to consider counterfactuals in which events of statistically unusual types are replaced by events of statistically usual types (Kahneman & Tversky 1982; Roese 1997).”

“Counterfactual thoughts are typically activated by a failed task, and they specify what might have been done differently to have succeeded in that task (Epstude & Roese, 2008; Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993; Roese, 1997).”

“…the normative, predictable changes that people make in nonepisodic CF tasks are also evident for personal past episodes (Kahneman and Tversky, 1982; Roese, 1997; Byrne, 2002), presumably because it is our first-hand experience of our own cognitive response to a similar situation that guides our…”

“That the counterfactual component of EEA stuck out to participants mirrors decades of research in psychology around the importance of counterfactual thinking—‘‘mental representations of alternatives to the past’’ (Roese 1997, p. 133)—as part of human cognition (Kahneman and Tversky 1982).”

“Counterfactual thinking, which corrects past mistakes by developing knowledge structures to avoid repeating those mistakes (Roese, 1997), serves as a learning experience that may help small business owners act differently in similar situations in the future and build their resilience accordingly.”

“Counterfactual means “counter to the facts” (Roese 1997), which assigns the “clash of worlds” combination of values to variables.”

“Several authors have suggested that people should be more likely to engage in upward CFT as opposed to downward CFT after experiencing negative events (Haynes et al., 2007; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Roese, 1994, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997).”

“In addition, rumination is also associated with counterfactual thinking (Spellman and Mandel, 2010; Epstude and Roese, 2017), the comparison between ‘what is’ and ‘what might have been’ (Roese, 1994, 1997).”

“, “if he’d been driving faster, other people would have been killed as well” (Markman, Gavanski, Sherman & McMullen, 1993; Roese, 1997).”

“In our study, disturbance related to BCa treatment was a strong independent predictor of regret—in accordance with the view that negative outcomes fuel counterfactual thinking, amplifying experience of regret.(16,30) Failure to take into account treatment‐related disturbances may obscure the relationship between the d…”

“; German, 1999; Roese, 1997).”

“Upward counterfactuals can serve a very positive function, such as providing an opportunity to learn from a mistake (Roese, 1994) or ‘illuminate a path to success’ (Roese, 1997).”

“38 This is favourable to allow non-technical audiences to conceptualise unknown modelling processes by associating change of input with output.”

“Fairness theory and counterfactual thinking Counterfactuals can be defined as ‘‘mental representations of alternatives to the past’’ (Roese, 1997, p. 133).”

“ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE published: 20 May 2014 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00451 Counterfactual thinking in moral judgment: an experimental study”

“People frequently engage in counterfactual think- ing by flexibly reshaping their memory of past events and constructing mental simulations of how past events might have turned out differently (e.g., Byrne, 2005; Epstude & Roese, 2008; Roese, 1997).”

“Psychologists of counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1997) observe that upward counterfactual thoughts are much more common than downward ones.”

“Although asking respondents to engage in counter-factual thinking may produce accounts susceptible to hind-sight bias (13), these stories nevertheless represent the reality understood by patients and families regarding the role of communication in contributing to or preventing medical errors.”

“Overall, research on counterfactual thinking has generally suggested that subtractive counterfactuals are more common and that mistaken actions inspire more regret (Roese, 1997).”