Roese's Explanation Of Counterfactual Thinking Problem

Counterfactual thinking involves alternatives to past events. We often ask ourselves, “What could we have done to change an outcome.” Imagine yourself at a football game, and you’re cheering for your home team, however you realize that there’s 30 seconds left in the 4th quarter, and your team is down by seven points. Unfortunately, the game has come to an end, your team lost. You are left thinking, if only we had scored the first touchdown, we would have won this game. This is an example of counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking is thinking about a past that didn’t happen. This recreation of events typically only happens for situations where a person wishes something had or had not happened (Roese, 1997).

In essence, counterfactual

For example, a person can create alternative circumstances that are relatively better or worse than the actuality. In his study, Roese (1997) seeks to identify and further define the two stages of counterfactual generation. Specifically, Roese’s research is centered around the distinction between the stages of activation and content for counterfactual thinking. In his research, Roese realized that there was very little data regarding the activation of counterfactual thinking oppose to the content for counterfactual thinking. In summary, affect and closeness were significant determinants of counterfactual thinking, three determinants (antecedent normality, antecedent action-inaction, and antecedent controllability) of counterfactual content, and two mechanisms (affective and judgmental consequences) of counterfactual thinking were discussed. More importantly, Roese (1997) states, “Counterfactual thinking in its functional basis is a significant component of good mental health.” While such thinking is often triggered by negative emotions, the benefits of such thought processes are positive. Moreover, without some extent of counterfactual thinking, we may all be possible worse

The researchers presented the participants with a series of situations in which a cause and an enabler contributed to a negative outcome. The authors state, “The aim of this paper was to explore whether people focus on enablers because they are unique or because they tend to be more controllable than causes (Frosch, Egan, & Hancock, 2015).” The results indicated that for counterfactual thinkers, the controllability of the event is possibly more important than the causal update of the event. As previous research shows, serious judgements can be affected by thinking counterfactually about particular events (Roese, 1997). Overall the results of the study showed that people prefer to undo controllable rather than uncontrollable events and enablers rather than causes across a range of contents. Similar to the types of events that lead to counterfactual thinking in everyday life, the scenarios used in the experiments covered a variety of types of negative outcomes which were brought about in a variety of