Counterfactual thinking.

“Counterfactual thinking is defined as thinking about an alternative decision that could have been made or thinking about different outcomes of a decision that has been made (e.g., Roese, 1997).”

“According to Roese (1997), downward counterfactuals often lead to affective contrast effects (imagining worse outcomes may lead one to feel better) and thus are generally associated with positive/adaptive outcomes.”

“Counterfactual thinking is the process by which people compare what is to what might have been (Roese, 1997; Zeelenberg et al., 1998).”

“Identifying ways in which personal actions contributed to the situation may provide basis for avoiding a similar occurrence in the future (Janoff-Bulman, 1979; Anderson and Riger, 1991), and rejects the notion that the outcome was inevitable (Roese, 1997).”

“…example, counterfactual thinking is useful for making real-world104 inferences (Amsel, Langer, & Loutzenhiser, 1991; Harris German, & Mills, 1996; Roese, 1997),105 altering real-world beliefs (Tal-Or, Boninger, Poran, & Gleicher, 2004), learning from mistakes106 (Roese, 1994), and re-evaluating…”

“We are more likely to search for the antecedent of the outcome if the outcome is bad rather than good (Roese 1997; Olsen 2015a).”

“…have been a good match for each other and we would have made a great couple…” Such mental representations of how our lives could have been better are termed counterfactual, representing an alternative scenario to the factual past (Kahneman and Miller 1986; Kahneman and Tversky 1982; Roese 1997).”

“Throughout the paper, we use the term realised to refer to events or outcomes that transpired (in juxtaposition to counterfactual), in alignment with prior literature on probability and counterfactual analysis (Roese, 1997).”

“…controllability of COVID-19 in this study (i.e., the extent to which consumers feel a sense of control over the pandemic); while closeness refers to the gap between an actual outcome and a counterfactual alternative (Gilbert, Morewedge, Risen, & Wilson, 2004; Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1996).”

“Answering the question will result in a potential response (as an example in Figure 1), and it is bene-ficial for improving future decision making (Roese, 1997).”

“Previous research has shown that simulating upward counterfactuals increases individuals’ perceptions of their ability to succeed in future performance contexts (Markman & Weary, 1996; McMullen et al., 1995; Nasco & Marsh, 1999; Roese, 1997; Sirois et al., 2010; Tal-Or et al., 2004).”

“Anticipation of postdecision regret makes inaction preferable to action (Mellers, Schwartz, Ho, & Ritov, 1997; Ritov & Baron, 1990; Roese, 1997; Zeelenberg, van den Bos, van Dijk, & Pieters, 2002).”

“, rather than gravity); and, typically, take some abnormal or normviolating action or event and change it back to its normal value (e.g., taking the usual route home; Byrne, 2007; Roese, 1997).”

“Similarly, prior work suggests that upward mental simulations serve to maximize preparedness (Roese, 1997).”

“Counterfactual thinking refers to the mental process by which people consider salient alternatives to the events that actually happened (Roese, 1997).”

“…from these norms in an actor's behaviour, they interpret it as the factor that prevented the “normal” hypothetical course of events to unfold, thus attributing the actor a causal role, and the responsibility for the final outcome (Markman & Tetlock, 2000; Roese, 1997; Wells & Gavanski, 1989).”

“Coun-terfactual thinking is a mental exercise where we attempt to isolate the specific actions which contributed to a (usually undesirable) outcome, with the goal of identifying how we could alter these facts to reach an alternative (and often more desirable) outcome [12].”

“This counterfactual thinking thus refers to the mental simulation of comparing the present state with other possible, but unobtained states (Roese, 1997).”

“…studied) forms of hypothetical thinking is that of counterfactual thinking (i.e., mentally simulating alternatives to past events by reconsidering actual occurrences in terms of alternative possible outcomes; for reviews, see Mandel, Hilton, & Catellani, 2005; Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995).”

“People were more likely to attribute to Mr. Jones a feeling of regret over his action when Mr. Jones usually would not take hitch-hikers in his car, compared to when he frequently did so (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kutscher & Feldman, 2019; Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1990; Roese, 1997).”

“It has been suggested that rape survivors do this because they have been conditioned by society to blame themselves, but survivors' tendency to fixate on something that they could have done differently is consistent with the counterfactual thinking engaged in by people who have experienced all sorts of other negative…”

“First, in counterfactual thinking (e.g., Roese, 1997), the individual cognitively simulates alternatives to factual states of affairs.”

“The fundamental feature of CFT is the generation of alternative realities in which a factual outcome is undone through mentally altering one or more antecedent event and then assessing the consequence of the alteration (Roese 1997).”

“…experiencing WFC may experience regretful thinking, described as thoughts regarding situations and outcomes that do not meet initial expectations (Roese, 1997; Zeelenberg et al., 1998) and that could adversely affect their attitudes toward their current entrepreneurial path, including work…”

“…in counterfactual thinking, as described in major works within the counterfactual thinking literature (e.g. Epstude and Roese 2008; Roese 1994, 1997; Roese, Hur, and Pennington 1999); these axes include: • Upward versus downward : An upward counterfactual thought is reimagining the past, such…”

“Counterfactual thinking is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence [98,99 [117 – 119]), later work suggests that these early successes were false alarms (e.g., [120]).”

“We regard it as a subset of CFT. Counter factual thinking is imagination about the past – what might have happened if a past event or action had or had not occurred counter to the fact (Byrne, 2016; Epstude & Roese, 2008; Roese, 1997).”

“In addition, people often rely on representativeness and availability heuristics when judging the likelihood of situational descriptions (Tversky and Kahneman 1974) and may use counterfactual thinking to regulate affect in response to unexpected positive or negative outcomes (Roese 1997).”

“Factual reflection involves mentally replaying what actually transpired (Davis, Lehman, Wortman, Silver, & Thompson, 1995; Martin & Tesser, 1989, 1996), whereas counterfactual reflection entails thinking about how events might have turned out differently by mentally playing out “what if” or “if only” possibilities (fo…”

“The perceived functions that are the focus of this study differ conceptually from functions of counterfactual thoughts that have been well documented in the literature (e.g., Epstude & Roese, 2008; Markman & McMullen, 2003; Roese, 1994, 1997; Roese & Epstude, 2017).”

“In a counterfactual statement, an antecedent of a past event is postulated to have changed in order to hypothetically alter the outcome of the event (e.g. ‘If I had studied harder, I would have passed the exam’; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Roese, 1997).”

““Counterfactual” means “counter to the facts” [45].”

“…it is well established that counterfactual thought might be particularly likely to be triggered in certain scenarios (McEleney & Byrne, 2006; Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995), it also appears to be ubiquitous in everyday life (Byrne, 2007; Markman et al., 1993; Petrocelli et al., 2011),…”

“In this context, most people automatically compare the actual outcome of the event with “what might have been” by generating hypothetical “if only” outcomes supposing an alternative event had taken place [1,2].”

“Counterfactual thinking is a likelihood comparison between the consequence of perceived events and alternative versions [39], for which variability has been argued to be the most important factor [40].”

“We investigated whether children’s counterfactual reasoning ability, that is their capacity to compare reality to an imagined alternative (Roese, 1997), or their ability to “hold in mind two possibilities” (Beck, Robinson, Carroll, & Apperly, 2006, p.”

“One specific emotion related to this type of counterfactual thinking is regret (Roese, 1997).”

“Treatment discrepancy has previously been linked to various outcomes task, extrarole, and counterproductive behaviors (see, e.g., Roese 1997, Shaw et al. 2003, Price et al. 2006, Zapata-Phelan et al. 2009).”

“While we believe that also in the CSEPP respondents may use retrospective thinking to estimate their own counterfactual, we suggest that other strategies—such as counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1997)— may be employed by intervention participants in order to estimate their own counterfactual.”

“The ability to simulate alternatives to factual events is called counterfactual thinking (CFT), and it is a signature of humans’ cognition [1].”

“Most research on counterfactual thinking has focused on people’s reactions to their own decisions and behaviors (Roese, 1997), but counterfactually imagining how other people might have acted differently, particular with respect to oneself, can also foster overreactions.”

“In addition, although the public tendency of possible counterfactual thinking and seeking alternative attributions (Kahneman and Miller, 1986; Roese, 1997) is employed to explain a distinctive difference between industry-wide and organizational crisis histories identified in this study in terms of public perceptions o…”

“Reviewing a large number of studies of counterfactual thinking, Roese (1997) claimed that such thoughts are typically instigated (a) by negative affect, and (b) by close calls.”

“What they select to change in their models of reality to create a counterfactual alternative depends on the availability of alternatives, guided by norms about what is usual – physically, socially, morally, and intra‐ personally – including descriptive norms based on statistical averages and prescriptive ones based on…”

“4 Counterfactual thinking is a mental construction of “what might have been” (Roese, 1996; 1997). may accept very risky bets aiming to lower the acquisition price and consequently achieve the breakeven faster.”

“Even though counterfactual effects may be observed across different yet motivationally linked behaviors, they are more immediate— and arguably stronger—in behaviors that make up the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional (Smallman and Roese 2009; Epstude and Roese 2008).”