Dispositional optimism weakly predicts upward, rather than downward, counterfactual thinking: A prospective correlational study using episodic recall.

Jessica Gamlin,Kai Epstude,Neal J Roese,Rachel Smallman,Peter Karl Jonason

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0237644

Abstract

Counterfactual thoughts center on how the past could have been different. Such thoughts may be differentiated in terms of direction of comparison, such that upward counterfactuals focus on how the past could have been better, whereas downward counterfactuals focus on how the past could have been worse. A key question is how such past-oriented thoughts connect to future-oriented individual differences such as optimism. Ambiguities surround a series of past studies in which optimism predicted relatively greater downward counterfactual thinking. Our main study (N = 1150) and six supplementary studies (N = 1901) re-examined this link to reveal a different result, a weak relation between optimism and upward (rather than downward) counterfactual thinking. These results offer an important correction to the counterfactual literature and are informative for theory on individual differences in optimism.

Highlights

IntroductionLooking back on one’s past to compare what transpired to what might have been, (i.e., counterfactual thinking) is a common feature of mental experience [1,2,3]
Goal of the present researchLooking back on one’s past to compare what transpired to what might have been, is a common feature of mental experience [1,2,3]
Counterfactual thoughts may be differentiated in terms of their direction of comparison, where upward counterfactuals center on how an outcome could have been better than actuality and downward counterfactuals center on how an outcome could have been worse than actuality

Summary

Introduction

Looking back on one’s past to compare what transpired to what might have been, (i.e., counterfactual thinking) is a common feature of mental experience [1,2,3]. Counterfactual thoughts may be differentiated in terms of their direction of comparison, where upward counterfactuals center on how an outcome could have been better than actuality and downward counterfactuals center on how an outcome could have been worse than actuality. Direction of comparison has been widely used to parse the content of counterfactual thinking. Such counterfactual thoughts about past outcomes may connect to future-oriented individual differences such as dispositional optimism, which is defined as domain-general beliefs that future outcomes will be positive [4, 5].

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