Browsing by Subject "counterfactual thinking"

Why did the car accident occur? How do we stop the recent rise in inflation? Which player is responsible for the team winning the game? In daily life, we are constantly presented with a variety of questions such as these about the causes of events. Given its prevalence and importance, we should hope to understand how people make causal judgments. But driven by a longstanding debate in philosophy, the psychology of causal judgment is fragmented between two concepts of causation. Productive concepts follow the intuition that causes interact with their effects through a chain of transmissions of quantities like force and energy. On the other hand, dependence concepts assume that causes make a difference to their effects in that if the cause had been different, the effect would also have been different. In this dissertation, I present six experiments demonstrating that causal judgment has a modal and metacognitive character, and I argue that dependence concepts alone can explain both of these characters. Specifically, in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I find that people make causal judgments in ways that are consistent with the idea that they do so by imagining alternative possibilities, and they even move their eyes to visually imagine these possibilities. In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, I find that people qualify their causal judgments by their confidence in these judgments in systematic ways. Throughout these six experiments, these patterns in causal judgments are well-described by a particular dependence concept of causation known as counterfactual sampling models. Moreover, productive concepts of causation are unable to make similar predictions. I conclude by suggesting that people make causal judgments by imagining alternative possibilities and by discussing the implications of this result for psychology and philosophy.

Counterfactual thinking is a spontaneously occurring process that involves imagining alternative versions of events that have already transpired. By creating “what if” and “if only” scenarios, people use the emotions of these new simulations to alter their perception of what actually occurred. These emotional changes then influence later behavior. While this process is largely automatic, counterfactual thinking can be intentionally utilized to alter the emotional response to a memory. By examining counterfactual thinking as an emotion regulation technique, we can begin to use this method to combat behaviors such as worry and rumination that are associated with maladaptive mental simulation. In my dissertation, I first provide a process model of counterfactual thinking, complete with the emotional consequences of each step, that is then compared to the existing process model of emotion regulation. I then present a series of experiments utilizing counterfactual thinking in a variety of emotion regulation contexts. Using self-report, psychophysiology, and functional magnetic imaging, this research begins to integrate the fields of counterfactual thinking and emotion regulation. Through this work, I find that creating alternative versions of events can effectively reduce the negativity of an emotional response to a memory. Importantly, intentional counterfactual thinking is especially effective for people who report higher levels of trait anxiety symptomology. Possible mechanisms and future implications of regulatory counterfactual thinking are discussed with suggestions on how to better integrate the areas of counterfactual thinking and emotion regulation.