Counterfactual processing of normal and exceptional events

Abstract

People often evaluate story or situation outcomes by mentally altering preceding events and simulating what impact this would have had on the outcome. This mental simulation process plays an important role in cognition and emotion. Kahneman and Tversky (1982) and Kahneman and Miller (1986) have proposed that a fundamental rule governing mental simulation is that people tend to change exceptional (i.e., unusual, surprising) events to their normal values, rather than vice versa. They reasoned that the psychological distance from an exception to its norm is less than the distance from the norm to that same exception. We proposed, however, that mental simulation processing is governed by the correspondence between outcomes and prior events: People will change events in the direction of normality to undo exceptional outcomes but change events in the direction of exceptionality to undo normal outcomes. This was the first mental simulation experiment using normal outcomes in addition to exceptional outcomes. Participants read stories describing a student studying for an exam. We manipulated the starting point (good-poor student), the outcome (pass-fail exam), and the norm-exception value of intervening events in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design. Participants were asked to "undo" the outcome by altering preceding events. In accordance with our hypothesis, participants primarily altered exceptional events in the direction of normality to undo exceptional outcomes (e.g., an excellent student who failed), but altered both norms and exceptions in the direction of greater exceptionality to undo normal outcomes. We suggest that