Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
You might have experienced counterfactual thinking in other situations. Once I was driving
across country, and my car was having some engine trouble. I really wanted to make it home
when I got near the end of my journey; I would have been extremely disappointed if the car
broke down only a few miles from my home. Perhaps you have noticed that once you get close
to finishing something, you feel like you really need to get it done. Counterfactual thinking has
even been observed in juries. Jurors who were asked to award monetary damages to others who
had been in an accident offered them substantially more in compensation if they barely avoided
injury than they offered if the accident seemed inevitable (Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland,
1988). [29]
Psychology in Everyday Life: Cognitive Biases in the Real World
Perhaps you are thinking that the kinds of errors that we have been talking about don’t seem that important. After all,
who really cares if we think there are more words that begin with the letter “R” than there actually are, or if bronze
medal winners are happier than the silver medalists? These aren’t big problems in the overall scheme of things. But it
turns out that what seem to be relatively small cognitive biases on the surface can have profound consequences for
people.
Why would so many people continue to purchase lottery tickets, buy risky investments in the stock market, or gamble
their money in casinos when the likelihood of them ever winning is so low? One possibility is that they are victims of
salience; they focus their attention on the salient likelihood of a big win, forgetting that the base rate of the event
occurring is very low. The belief in astrology, which all scientific evidence suggests is not accurate, is probably driven
in part by the salience of the occasions when the predictions are correct. When a horoscope comes true (which will, of
course, happen sometimes), the correct prediction is highly salient and may allow people to maintain the overall false
belief.
People may also take more care to prepare for unlikely events than for more likely ones, because the unlikely ones are
more salient. For instance, people may think that they are more likely to die from a terrorist attack or a homicide than
they are from diabetes, stroke, or tuberculosis. But the odds are much greater of dying from the latter than the former.
And people are frequently more afraid of flying than driving, although the likelihood of dying in a car crash is
hundreds of times greater than dying in a plane crash (more than 50,000 people are killed on U.S. highways every
year). Because people don’t accurately calibrate their behaviors to match the true potential risks (e.g., they drink and
drive or don’t wear their seatbelts), the individual and societal level costs are often quite large (Slovic, 2000). [30]