The influence of controllability and causal status on counterfactual thinking and associated affect

Abstract

Counterfactual thinking involves mentally "undoing" an event and imagining how the resulting outcome could have been different. One body of existing literature provides a functional account of counterfactual thinking such that generating counterfactuals that are upward in nature (i.e., would lead to a more positive outcome) is thought to be largely adaptive in that it aids in planning and regulating future behavior, though at the cost of experiencing temporarily heightened negative affect (Epstude & Roese, 2008; Kahneman & Miller, 1986). It has been well established that the degree to which a given event is under the actor's control (i.e., its controllability) predicts whether people mentally undo that event in counterfactual reasoning. With the notable exception of those suffering from severe depression, people tend to mentally undo past events that were within the actor's control (Frosch, Egan, & Hancock, 2015; Markman & Miller, 2006), a finding consistent with the notion that upward counterfactual thinking may aid people in better planning their behavior in the future. However, there are several major limitations to past research arguing for a link between counterfactual thinking and subsequent successful behavior or goal achievement. First, although counterfactual thought has a preparatory function for one's own behaviors, past studies that experimentally manipulated the controllability of events to determine their subsequent influence on counterfactual thinking utilized only third-person hypothetical events (i.e., thinking about hypothetical others). Past results about third-person counterfactual thinking cannot automatically be assumed to be indicative of first-person counterfactual thinking given observers' well-known attributional biases for others' behaviors (e.g., the correspondence bias, Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Specifically, events perceived as highly controllable to external actors may be perceived as less controllable when imagining oneself as the focal actor. Because events that are controllable are the likely focus of counterfactual thoughts, the results of such counterfactual thinking studies may differ radically in the first person. Second, it has also been established that the location of a given event within the causal sequence of events that generated the outcome (i.e., its causal status; Segura et al., 2002) strongly influences whether people mentally undo that event. Yet whether controllability and causal status have interactive effects on counterfactual thinking remains unresolved. Third, in past research it has been presumed that the controllability of events is the primary factor influencing the heightened negative affect accompanying upward counterfactual thinking (Mandel, 2003b; Markman & Miller, 2006). Yet given that causal status influences counterfactual thinking, it is reasonable to suspect that it may also influence the affective response, and causal status and controllability may also have interactive effects. Accordingly, the central goal of the current work was to address the following questions: (1) Do past findings on counterfactual thinking hold true when reasoning about oneself? (2) What are the separate and interactive influences of controllability and causal status on counterfactual thinking? (3) Does causal status (and controllability) predict changes in affect when people reason counterfactually about negative events in their own lives? Experiments 1 and 2 found no difference between first- and third-person reasoners with respect to how controllability and causal status influenced their counterfactual thoughts. Experiment 3 established revisions to the methods used in past studies to cleanly test for an interaction of causal status and controllability. Experiments 4 - 6 provided evidence that people prefer to counterfactually intervene on intermediate rather than root causes in a causal chain, and suggest that causal status and controllability do not interactively influence counterfactual thinking. These studies also suggested that the controllability of events may not, in fact, influence counterfactual thinking under the conditions tested. Finally, Experiment 7 explored whether controllability and causal status predict changes in affect following upward counterfactual thinking about real first-person occurrences reported by study participants. The results of Experiment 7 showed, unexpectedly, that the influences of controllability and causal status on affect were moderated by domain. Causally deeper counterfactual thoughts predicted negative change in affect for interpersonal but not academic events. Generating counterfactuals for controllable events predicted positive change in affect for academic but not interpersonal events. Together, these studies advance new knowledge about counterfactual thought and suggest that prior findings may not be as robust as previously assumed. Implications for these findings and suggested future directions in counterfactual and causal reasoning research are discussed.