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Counterfactual Thinking
In addition to influencing our judgments about ourselves and others, the ease with which we can
retrieve potential experiences from memory can have an important effect on our own emotions.
If we can easily imagine an outcome that is better than what actually happened, then we may
experience sadness and disappointment; on the other hand, if we can easily imagine that a result
might have been worse than what actually happened, we may be more likely to experience
happiness and satisfaction. The tendency to think about and experience events according to
“what might have been” is known ascounterfactual thinking (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Roese,
2005). [26]
Imagine, for instance, that you were participating in an important contest, and you won the silver
(second-place) medal. How would you feel? Certainly you would be happy that you won the
silver medal, but wouldn’t you also be thinking about what might have happened if you had been
just a little bit better—you might have won the gold medal! On the other hand, how might you
feel if you won the bronze (third-place) medal? If you were thinking about the
counterfactuals (t he “what might have beens”) perhaps the idea of not getting any medal at all
would have been highly accessible; you’d be happy that you got the medal that you did get,
rather than coming in fourth.
Tom Gilovich and his colleagues (Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995) [28] investigated this idea
by videotaping the responses of athletes who won medals in the 1992 Summer Olympic Games.
They videotaped the athletes both as they learned that they had won a silver or a bronze medal
and again as they were awarded the medal. Then the researchers showed these videos, without
any sound, to raters who did not know which medal which athlete had won. The raters were
asked to indicate how they thought the athlete was feeling, using a range of feelings from
“agony” to “ecstasy.” The results showed that the bronze medalists were, on average, rated as
happier than were the silver medalists. In a follow-up study, raters watched interviews with many
of these same athletes as they talked about their performance. The raters indicated what we
would expect on the basis of counterfactual thinking—the silver medalists talked about their
disappointments in having finished second rather than first, whereas the bronze medalists
focused on how happy they were to have finished third rather than fourth.