ABSTRACT
The relative impact of differential motivation and knowledge for both counterfactual mutation focus and attributional processes were examined. Functional views of counterfactual thinking predict that what feature of an event is focused on during mutation is influenced by the perceiver's motivation, and that what is mutated is then perceived as causal of the outcome. Other research, however, has indicated that mutation and attribution are based on distinct processes and that the two are not necessarily correlated. In three experiments we investigated the relationship between target mutation and blame assignment following a negative outcome. As expected, both when group that one is highly identified with and when the self is involved in a negative event, attributions were biased in favour of the self or the in-group. Mutation did not, however, show either a self- or group-serving bias. These findings support the view that mutation focus stems from a relatively automatic orientation towards features that may be differentially available to perceivers with varying degrees of knowledge about a domain, whereas the attribution of blame results from conscious processes that permit motivational influences to operate.