The Effect of Counterfactual Potency on Behavioral Intentions.

This research examines how counterfactual potency (CP), the multiplicative effect of the likelihoods of the "if" and "then" clauses of counterfactuals, determines the effects of counterfactuals on behavioral intentions. In Study 1, we found that participants who read highly (vs. minimally) mutable vignettes perceived the counterfactuals as more likely and endorsed relevant intentions more. However, CP did not mediate the effect of mutability on intentions. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that CP directly affected intentions and also mediated the effects of mutability on intentions when mutability was specifically manipulated via controllability (Study 2) or norm violation (Study 3). Finally, Study 4 used archival reaction time data to show that more concrete counterfactuals were perceived as more likely and subsequently facilitated intentions. Taken together, the current research provides evidence that more likely counterfactuals facilitate behavioral intentions.

The Spontaneous Counterfactual Inference Task: Misremembering What Might Have Been.

Counterfactuals, thoughts about "what might have been," play an important role in causal judgment, emotion, and motivation, and spontaneously arise during daily life. However, current methods to measure spontaneous counterfactual thinking are cumbersome and subjective. The current research adapts a paradigm from the Spontaneous Trait Inference literature to develop the Spontaneous Counterfactual Inference measure (SCFI), which uses false recognition of counterfactual statements as a measure of spontaneous counterfactual thought. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrate that the SCFI is sensitive to precursors of counterfactual thinking: norm violation and counterfactual closeness. Study 2 demonstrates that the SCFI converges with the generation of counterfactual statements in an open-ended writing task. The SCFI also predicts two important consequences of counterfactual thought, blame (Study 3), and intention endorsement (Study 4). The SCFI thus offers a new tool for researchers interested in counterfactual thinking.

"What was meant to be" versus "what might have been": Effects of culture and control on counterfactual thinking.

Counterfactual thinking is a ubiquitous feature of daily life with links to causal reasoning. Therefore, we argue that cultures that vary in perceptions of what controls important life outcomes may also vary in counterfactual thought. Investigating White American and United Arab Emirates-based Arab participants' counterfactual potency and spontaneous counterfactual thinking, we found that Arab participants endorsed counterfactual thoughts less than White Americans, and were unaffected by the routine nature of action when negative outcomes were severe. Differences in counterfactual endorsement in response to severe negative outcomes were linked to greater beliefs in divine control and fate in Arab participants, and not to religiosity, reinforcing an important role of perceptions of control in counterfactual thought. However, although reporting less counterfactual endorsement overall, Arabs showed a similar pattern of counterfactual thought to White Americans when negative outcomes were mild, or when reporting spontaneous thought. Arabs likewise showed a similar pattern of regret as White Americans regardless of event severity, reporting more regret when outcomes resulted from unusual action. These patterns suggest a dissociation between affect and cognition, and between what kind of outcomes are subject to counterfactual scrutiny in Arab participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of Choice Restriction on Accuracy and User Experience in an Internet-Based Geopolitical Forecasting Task.

Large-scale geopolitical forecasting tournaments have emerged in recent years as effective testbeds for conducting research into novel forecasting tools and methods. A challenge of such tournaments involves the distribution of forecasting load across forecasters, since there are often more forecasting questions than an individual forecaster can answer. Intelligent load distribution, or triage, may therefore be helpful in ensuring that all questions have sufficient numbers of forecasts to benefit from crowd-based aggregation and that individual forecasters are matched to the questions for which they are best suited. A possible downside of triage, however, is that it restricts the choices of forecasters, potentially degrading motivation and accuracy. In two studies involving pools of novice forecasters recruited online, we examined the impact of limiting forecaster choice on forecasters' accuracy and subjective experience, including motivation. In Study 1, we tested the impact of restricted choice by comparing the forecasting accuracy and subjective experience of users who perceived they did or did not have choice in the questions they forecasted. In Study 2, we further tested the impact of restricted choice by providing users with different menu sizes of questions from which to choose. In both studies, we found no evidence that limiting forecaster choice adversely affected forecasting accuracy or subjective experience. This suggests that in large-scale forecasting tournaments, it may be possible to implement choice-limiting triage strategies without sacrificing individual accuracy and motivation.

Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel.

Time is among the most important yet mysterious aspects of experience. We investigated everyday mental time travel, especially into the future. Two community samples, contacted at random points for 3 (Study 1; 6,686 reports) and 14 days (Study 2; 2,361 reports), reported on their most recent thought. Both studies found that thoughts about the present were frequent, thoughts about the future also were common, whereas thoughts about the past were rare. Thoughts about the present were on average highly happy and pleasant but low in meaningfulness. Pragmatic prospection (thoughts preparing for action) was evident in thoughts about planning and goals. Thoughts with no time aspect were lower in sociality and experiential richness. Thoughts about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary. Subjective experiences of thinking about past and future often were similar-while both differed from present focus, consistent with views that memory and prospection use similar mental structures.

(How) Do You Regret Killing One to Save Five? Affective and Cognitive Regret Differ After Utilitarian and Deontological Decisions.

Sacrificial moral dilemmas, in which opting to kill one person will save multiple others, are definitionally suboptimal: Someone dies either way. Decision-makers, then, may experience regret about these decisions. Past research distinguishes affective regret, negative feelings about a decision, from cognitive regret, thoughts about how a decision might have gone differently. Classic dual-process models of moral judgment suggest that affective processing drives characteristically deontological decisions to reject outcome-maximizing harm, whereas cognitive deliberation drives characteristically utilitarian decisions to endorse outcome-maximizing harm. Consistent with this model, we found that people who made or imagined making sacrificial utilitarian judgments reliably expressed relatively more affective regret and sometimes expressed relatively less cognitive regret than those who made or imagined making deontological dilemma judgments. In other words, people who endorsed causing harm to save lives generally felt more distressed about their decision, yet less inclined to change it, than people who rejected outcome-maximizing harm.

How far to the road not taken? The effect of psychological distance on counterfactual direction.

Upward and downward counterfactuals serve the distinct motivational functions of self-improvement and self-enhancement, respectively. Drawing on construal level theory, which contends that increasing psychological distance from an event leads people to focus on high-level, self-improvement versus low-level, self-enhancement goals, we propose that distance will alter counterfactual direction in a way that satisfies these distinct motives. We found that people generated more downward counterfactuals about recent versus distant past events, while they tended to generate more upward counterfactuals about distant versus recent past events (Experiment 1). Consistent results were obtained for social distance (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 demonstrated that distance affects the direction of open-ended counterfactual thoughts. Finally, Experiment 4 explored a potential mechanism, demonstrating that manipulating temporal distance produced changes in participants' self-improvement versus self-enhancement motivations when responding to negative events. Future directions and broader implications for self-control, social support, empathy, and learning are discussed.

Functions of personal experience and of expression of regret.

Although learning and preparing for future behavior are well-established functions of regret, social functions have been largely ignored. We suggest a new model of the functions of regret, the Privately Experienced Versus Expressed Regret model, in which private experience and public expression differentially serve these functions. The current research examined this model using both naturalistic and experimental approaches. In Study 1, we coded tweets about regret posted on social media to examine whether this content emphasized social relationships versus learning and preparation. Study 2 experimentally examined the hypothesized social closeness function for expression of regrets. Study 3 further examined how privately experienced and publicly expressed regrets differ on the social closeness and learning and preparatory functions. Studies 4 and 5 confirmed the specific social closeness function rather than global social benefits. This research suggests that the social expression of regret differs from private experience in both form and function.

Pseudo-dyadic "interaction" on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Psychological researchers have begun to utilize Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) marketplace as a participant pool. Although past work has established that MTurk is well suited to examining individual behavior, pseudo-dyadic interactions, in which participants falsely believe they are interacting with a partner, are a key element of social and cognitive psychology. The ability to conduct such interdependent research on MTurk would increase the utility of this online population for a broad range of psychologists. The present research therefore attempts to qualitatively replicate well-established pseudo-dyadic tasks on MTurk in order to establish the utility of this platform as a tool for researchers. We find that participants do behave as if a partner is real, even when doing so incurs a financial cost, and that they are sensitive to subtle information about the partner in a minimal-groups paradigm, supporting the use of MTurk for pseudo-dyadic research.

Counterfactual seeking: The scenic overlook of the road not taken.

Decision makers faced with an opportunity to learn the outcome of a foregone alternative must balance anticipated regret, should that information be unfavorable, with the potential benefits of this information in reducing experienced regret. Counterfactual seeking, the choice to learn more about foregone alternatives, may be a functional, regret-regulating strategy for individuals already experiencing regret. Counterfactual seeking increases in response to dissatisfying outcomes (Studies 1 and 2). Counterfactual seeking is generally able to reduce dissatisfaction (Study 2), regardless of whether individuals personally chose to view this information or were randomly assigned to do so (Study 3). Moreover, both imaginative (vs. factual) thoughts about the foregone option and upward (vs. downward) counterfactual thoughts play a role in this improvement in satisfaction (Study 4). Regret thus has a complex influence in how individuals engage with counterfactual information.

Praise for regret: People value regret above other negative emotions.

What do people think about the emotion of regret? Recent demonstrations of the psychological benefits of regret have been framed against an assumption that most people find regret to be aversive, both when experienced but also when recalled later. Two studies explored lay evaluations of regret experiences, revealing them to be largely favorable rather than unfavorable. Study 1 demonstrated that regret, but not other negative emotions, was dominated by positive more than negative evaluations. In both studies 1 and 2, although participants saw a great deal of benefit from their negative emotions, regret stood out as particularly beneficial. Indeed, in study 2, regret was seen to be the most beneficial of 12 negative emotions on all five functions of: making sense of past experiences, facilitating approach behaviors, facilitating avoidance behaviors, gaining insights into the self, and in preserving social harmony. Moreover, in study 2, individuals made self-serving ascriptions of regret, reporting greater regret experiences for themselves than for others. In short, people value their regrets substantially more than they do other negative emotions.

Self-Report Measures of Individual Differences in Regulatory Focus: A Cautionary Note.

Regulatory focus theory distinguishes between two independent structures of strategic inclination, promotion versus prevention. However, the theory implies two potentially independent definitions of these inclinations, the self-guide versus the reference-point definitions. Two scales (the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire, Higgins al., 2001, and the General Regulatory Focus Measure, Lockwood, Jordan, & Kunda, 2002) have been widely used to measure dispositional regulatory focus. We suggest that these two scales align respectively with the two definitions, and find that the two scales are largely uncorrelated. Both conceptual and methodological implications are discussed.

Dare to Compare: Fact-Based versus Simulation-Based Comparison in Daily Life.

We examined the relative frequency of social, counterfactual, past-temporal, and future-temporal comparison in daily life using an experience-sampling method, in which participants were randomly prompted to record thought samples using palmtop computers carried for two weeks. Comparative thought accounted for 12% of all thoughts, and all four comparison types occurred with equivalent frequency. Comparisons may be either fact-based (i.e., based on actuality, as in social and past-temporal comparison) or simulation-based (i.e., based on imagination, as in counterfactual and future-temporal comparison). Because the latter are more "unbounded," and because greater perceived opportunity invites greater self-improvement, we predicted and found that counterfactual and future-temporal comparison were more likely to be upward (vs. downward) than social and past-temporal comparison. All comparison types focused on approach more than avoidance motives, except for counterfactuals, which showed equivalent focus on both. These findings reveal the prominence of comparative thought in daily life, and underscore the value an integrative theory that describes social, counterfactual, or temporal comparison using a common theoretical platform.

Regret and Behavior: Comment on Zeelenberg and Pieters.

Zeelenberg and Pieter's (2007) regret regulation theory 1.0 offers a synthesis that brings together concepts spanning numerous literatures. We have no substantive disagreement with their theory, but instead offer 3 observations to further aid regret researchers studying consumer decision making. First, the overall arch of any regret theory must be situated within an understanding of behavior regulation. Second, the distinction between regrets of action versus inaction is best understood in terms of motivational implications, particularly with regard to Higgin's (1998) distinction between promotion and prevention focus. Third, the opportunity principle offers a particularly clear means of summarizing the regulatory consequences of the regret experience. Regret is an emotion pivotal for decision making, and its cognitive underpinning has and continues to be elucidated in research focusing on counterfactual thinking.

The propensity effect: when foresight trumps hindsight.

The hindsight bias is an inability to disregard known outcome information when estimating earlier likelihoods of that outcome. The propensity effect, a reversal of this hindsight bias, is apparently unique to judgments involving momentum and trajectory (in which there is a strongly implied propensity toward a specific outcome). In the present study, the propensity effect occurred only in judgments involving dynamic stimuli (computer animations of traffic accidents vs. text descriptions), and only when foresight judgments were temporally near to (vs. far from) a focal outcome. This research was motivated by the applied question of whether the courtroom use of computer animation increases the hindsight bias in jurors' decision making; findings revealed that the hindsight bias was more than doubled when computer animations, rather than text-plus-diagram descriptions, were used. Therefore, in addition to providing theoretical insights of relevance to cognitive, perceptual, and social psychologists, these results have important legal implications.

What we regret most... and why.

Which domains in life produce the greatest potential for regret, and what features of those life domains explain why? Using archival and laboratory evidence, the authors show that greater perceived opportunity within life domains evokes more intense regret. This pattern is consistent with previous publications demonstrating greater regret stemming from high rather than low opportunity or choice. A meta-analysis of 11 regret ranking studies revealed that the top six biggest regrets in life center on (in descending order) education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Study Set 2 provided new laboratory evidence that directly linked the regret ranking to perceived opportunity. Study Set 3 ruled out an alternative interpretation involving framing effects. Overall, these findings show that people's biggest regrets are a reflection of where in life they see their largest opportunities; that is, where they see tangible prospects for change, growth, and renewal.