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Counterfactuals are thoughts regarding alternatives to past outcomes, and they are an increasingly active topic of psychological research. Recently, this work has been applied to organizational and marketing domains. This introduction summarizes the theoretical basis underlying the effects of counterfactual thinking on emotions, decisions, and perception, and presents the four articles that comprise this special issue. (C)2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Counterfactual thinking refers to imaginings of alternatives to past outcomes. These thoughts of what might have been often take the form of a conditional proposition, as in "If only I had bought a Ford instead of a Chrysler, I would have saved a lot of money." Typically, the antecedent (specifying "if") constitutes an action or decision by an individual, and the consequent (specifying "then") describes a state of being, often framed in evaluative terms. Counterfactuals can focus, therefore, on alternative outcomes that are better than actuality (upward counterfactuals) or that are worse than actuality (downward counterfactuals). Psychologists have been interested in counterfactual thinking because they seem to be intimately related to emotion, social perception, and self-understanding (see Roese, 1997, for a review).
The intellectual examination of counterfactuals is an inherently multidisciplinary pursuit, ranging from philosophy (e.g., Goodman, 1947) to historical and political analysis (e.g., Tetlock & Belkin, 1996). Psychologically oriented research on counterfactual thinking was conducted by cognitive psychologists beginning in the 1970s (e.g., Fillenbaum, 1974), but when Kahneman and Tversky (1982) examined counterfactuals from the vantage point of biased judgment and decision-making, interest in counterfactuals mushroomed. Much of this work was conducted by social psychologists, who were interested in the impact of counterfactuals on emotions, suspicion, superstition, blame, expectancy, and self-inference (e.g., Roese, 1997). By the 1990s, organizational behavior theorists were applying this research to consumer-oriented judgment and decision-making (e.g., Creyer & Gu rhan, 1997; Meyers-Levy & Maheswaran, 1992).
Although the effects of counterfactual thinking on social judgment are broad and variegated, all may be rooted in either of two underlying mechanisms: contrast effects and causal inference effects (Roese, 1997). Contrast effects occur when a judgment becomes more extreme via the juxtaposition of some anchor or standard. For example, a cup of coffee feels...