The Functional Theory of Counterfactual Thinking

No abstract is available for this paper.

• Publication year

  2008

• Venue

  Personality and Social Psychology Review

• Publication date

  2008-05-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/1088868308316091PMID 18453477PMCID PMC2408534
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Stereotype activation and inhibition

  2013cited by this paper
• Twisted Pair: Counterfactual Thinking and the Hindsight Bias

  2008cited by this paper
• Dare to Compare: Fact-Based versus Simulation-Based Comparison in Daily Life.

  2008cited by this paper
• Counterfactual thinking, persistence, and performance: A test of the Reflection and Evaluation Model

  2008influential reference
• Schizophrenia involves impairment in the activation of intentions by counterfactual thinking.

  2008cited by this paper
• The Philosophy of As if

  2008cited by this paper
• Counterfactuals, coping strategies and psychological distress among breast cancer patients

  2007cited by this paper
• The goal construct in social psychology.

  2007cited by this paper
• Whatever happened to "What might have been"? Regrets, happiness, and maturity.

  2007cited by this paper
• Whatever Happened to "What Might Have Been"?

  2007cited by this paper
• Beyond rationality: Counterfactual thinking and behavior regulation

  2007cited by this paper
• Neurofunctional correlates of vulnerability to psychosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

  2007cited by this paper
• Post-event processing in social anxiety.

  2007cited by this paper
• Regret intensity, diurnal cortisol secretion, and physical health in older individuals: evidence for directional effects and protective factors.

  2007cited by this paper
• Implications of Counterfactual Structure for Creative Generation and Analytical Problem Solving

  2007influential reference
• Toward a developmental psychology of Sehnsucht (life longings): the optimal (utopian) life.

  2007cited by this paper
• Regret and Behavior: Comment on Zeelenberg and Pieters.

  2007cited by this paper
• Seven Principles of Goal Activation: A Systematic Approach to Distinguishing Goal Priming From Priming of Non-Goal Constructs

  2007cited by this paper
• Better, Stronger, Faster: Self-Serving Judgment, Affect Regulation, and the Optimal Vigilance Hypothesis

  2007cited by this paper
• On the relation between counterfactual and causal reasoning

  2007cited by this paper
• Completed vs. interrupted priming: Reduced accessibility from post-fulfillment inhibition

  2007cited by this paper
• Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, 2nd ed.

  2007cited by this paper
• The probability of causal conditionals.

  2007cited by this paper
• A Theory of Regret Regulation 1.0

  2007cited by this paper
• At the boundaries of automaticity: negation as reflective operation.

  2006cited by this paper
• The Construction of Preference: When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?

  2006cited by this paper
• Insight and frontal cortical function in schizophrenia: a review.

  2006cited by this paper
• Thinking within the box: The relational processing style elicited by counterfactual mind-sets.

  2006cited by this paper
• Self-Regulation of Common Age-Related Challenges: Benefits for Older Adults’ Psychological and Physical Health

  2006cited by this paper
• Comparisons mental models, comparisons, and the action effect in judgements of regret.

  2006cited by this paper
• Long Ago It Was Meant to Be: The Interplay Between Time, Construal, and Fate Beliefs

  2006cited by this paper
• Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence.

  2006cited by this paper
• Das schönste deutsche Wort

  2006cited by this paper
• Untangling Social Function and Social Cognition: A Review of Concepts and Measurement

  2006cited by this paper
• Depression, Control, and Counterfactual Thinking: Functional for Whom?

  2006cited by this paper
• Judgments over time : the interplay of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

  2006cited by this paper
• Value from hedonic experience and engagement.

  2006cited by this paper
• Counterfactual thinking and regulatory fit

  2006cited by this paper
• Comparisons, mental models, and the action effect in judgments of regret

  2006cited by this paper
• The Road Not TakenCounterfactual Thinking Over Time

  2006cited by this paper
• On the Inexplicability of the Implicit: Differences in the Information Provided by Implicit and Explicit Tests

  2006cited by this paper
• Enactment of approach and avoidance behavior influences the scope of perceptual and conceptual attention

  2006cited by this paper
• How to do more things with ‘If’

  2006cited by this paper
• Children's thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities.

  2006cited by this paper
• Sex Differences in Regret: All For Love or Some For Lust?

  2006cited by this paper
• Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes

  2006cited by this paper
• Culture and Counterfactuals

  2006cited by this paper
• THE MILDLY DEPRESSED EXPERIENCE MORE POST-DECISIONAL REGRET THAN THE NON-DEPRESSED

  2005cited by this paper
• Coping with disappointing outcomes: Retroactive pessimism and motivated inhibition of counterfactuals

  2005cited by this paper
• What We Regret Most... and Why

  2005cited by this paper
• Is regret for inaction relatively self-enhancing?

  2005cited by this paper
• The mechanics of imagination: Automaticity and control in counterfactual thinking

  2005cited by this paper
• Accessibility from active and fulfilled goals

  2005cited by this paper
• How Global Versus Local Perception Fits Regulatory Focus

  2005cited by this paper
• Value From Regulatory Fit

  2005influential reference
• Don't stereotype, think different! Overcoming automatic stereotype activation by mindset priming

  2005cited by this paper
• Only spontaneous counterfactual thinking is impaired in patients with prefrontal cortex lesions.

  2005cited by this paper
• Regret and its avoidance: a neuroimaging study of choice behavior

  2005cited by this paper
• The Interplay Between Goal Intentions and Implementation Intentions

  2005cited by this paper
• Ruminative coping and post-event processing in social anxiety.

  2005cited by this paper
• Outcome representations, counterfactual comparisons and the human orbitofrontal cortex: implications for neuroimaging studies of decision-making.

  2005cited by this paper
• Positive affect as implicit motivator: on the nonconscious operation of behavioral goals.

  2005cited by this paper
• Priming trait inferences through pictures and moving pictures: the impact of open and closed mindsets.

  2005cited by this paper
• “What I did” versus “what I might have done”: Effect of factual versus counterfactual thinking on blame, guilt, and shame in prisoners ☆

  2005cited by this paper
• Culture and Social Comparison Seeking: The Role of Self-Motives

  2005cited by this paper
• The Involvement of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in the Experience of Regret

  2004cited by this paper
• Counterfactual and prefactual conditionals.

  2004cited by this paper
• Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behavior

  2004cited by this paper
• Gay and straight possible selves: goals, identity, subjective well-being, and personality development.

  2004cited by this paper
• Activating a mental simulation mind-set through generation of alternatives: Implications for debiasing in related and unrelated domains

  2004cited by this paper
• When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among

  2004cited by this paper
• The Implicit Volition Model: On the Preconscious Regulation of Temporarily Adopted Goals

  2004cited by this paper
• Promotion and prevention strategies for self-regulation: A motivated cognition perspective.

  2004cited by this paper
• Counterfactual conditionals and false belief: a developmental dissociation

  2004cited by this paper
• Children's counterfactual inferences about long and short causal chains

  2003cited by this paper
• Regrets Of Action And Inaction Across Cultures

  2003cited by this paper
• Effects of negation and situational presence on the accessibility of text information.

  2003cited by this paper
• Counterfactuals, emotions, and context

  2003cited by this paper
• Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion.

  2003cited by this paper
• If Only I Hadn't Smoked: The Impact of Counterfactual Thinking on a Smoking-Related Behavior.

  2003cited by this paper
• Rumination, imagination, and personality: Specters of the past and future in the present.

  2003cited by this paper
• A Reflection and Evaluation Model of Comparative Thinking

  2003influential reference
• Regulatory focus and temporal distance

  2003cited by this paper
• The Devaluation Effect: Activating a Need Devalues Unrelated Objects

  2003cited by this paper
• The debiasing effect of counterfactual mind-sets: Increasing the search for disconfirmatory information in group decisions

  2003cited by this paper
• The psychology of doing nothing: forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion.

  2003cited by this paper
• “Blaming The Victim” Under Memory Load

  2003cited by this paper
• The probability of conditionals: The psychological evidence

  2003cited by this paper
• A multidimensional structure for repetitive thought: what's on your mind, and how, and how much?

  2003cited by this paper
• Comparison processes in social judgment: mechanisms and consequences.

  2003cited by this paper
• Heuristics and Biases: When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction among Olympic Medalists

  2002cited by this paper
• Intention—Behavior Relations: A Conceptual and Empirical Review

  2002cited by this paper
• The motivating function of thinking about the future: expectations versus fantasies.

  2002cited by this paper
• Conditionals: a theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference.

  2002cited by this paper
• Spontaneous causal inferences

  2002cited by this paper
• The inaction effect in the psychology of regret.

  2002cited by this paper
• Homesickness among students in two cultures: antecedents and consequences.

  2002cited by this paper
• Emotional prosody: sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody.

  2002cited by this paper
• Perceived control of life regrets: good for young and bad for old adults.

  2002cited by this paper
• Forgetting all else: on the antecedents and consequences of goal shielding.

  2002cited by this paper

• Toward a counterfactual narrative criminology: the IF Project

  2026cites this paper
• Side-by-side comparisons, brand equity and counterfactual thinking: The role of non-chosen brand and claim similarity on post-consumption product evaluation

  2026cites this paper
• If only I had not fallen down the rabbit hole: Counterfactual thinking reduces engagement with conspiracy theories

  2026cites this paper
• When Do Refugees Regret Their Decision to Flee? The Role of Perceived Forcedness, Perils During Migration and Counterfactual Thinking

  2026cites this paper
• Counterfactual Spaces

  2026cites this paper
• Emotion-regulation strategy use and commitment to a performance goal: the role of reappraisal tactics

  2026cites this paper
• A Theory of Aberrant Work-Life Navigation

  2025cites this paper
• Position: Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought

  2025cites this paper
• A Randomized Controlled Trial of Counterfactual and Personalized Normative Feedback Interventions to Increase Safe Drinking Strategies

  2025cites this paper
• If Only I Could Drink Like Everyone Else: Effects of Counterfactual Thinking and Personalized Normative Feedback on Perceived Behavioral Control Over Drinking

  2025cites this paper
• What Could Go Wrong? Anxiety Fuels, but Optimism Buffers Negative Counterfactual Divergent Thinking

  2025cites this paper
• The Role of Controllability and Foreseeability in Children's Counterfactual Emotions

  2025influential citation
• Counterfactual Reasoning Development in Different Languages

  2025cites this paper
• Does neural computation feel like something?

  2025cites this paper
• Monetization could corrupt algorithmic explanations

  2025cites this paper
• Counterfactual thinking is associated with impoverished attentional control in women prone to self-critical rumination.

  2025cites this paper
• What if there is a better way? Investigating upward counterfactual thinking as a metacognitive self‐regulatory strategy for job crafting

  2025cites this paper
• Counterfactual quantum measurements

  2025cites this paper
• COVID-19 death toll predictions show that triggering counterfactual thinking deteriorates judgmental performance

  2025cites this paper
• Children infer counterfactual information from others' facial expressions.

  2025cites this paper
• Learning to Plan from Actual and Counterfactual Experiences

  2025cites this paper
• A unified framework for evaluating robustness of Machine Learning Interpretability for Prospect Risking

  2025cites this paper
• The pursuit of general intelligence and the limits of robust alignment

  2025cites this paper
• “What Might Happen With Generative AI?” Examining the Role of Prefactual Thinking in the Cognitive Mediation Model in the Context of Emerging Technologies

  2025cites this paper
• Maternal Regret and the Myth of the Good Mother: A Psychosocial Thematic Analysis of Italian Women in a Patriarchal Culture

  2025cites this paper
• Understanding the Effects of Counterfactual Thinking with Protective Behavioral Strategies on Healthy Eating Using the COM-B Framework.

  2025cites this paper
• Counterfactual thinking within the first year after sexual assault: examining associations with posttraumatic stress reactions in the (Norwegian) TRUST-study

  2025cites this paper
• Investigating the content and correlates of undergraduate students' academic regrets

  2025cites this paper
• The effect of counterfactual treatment on the consistency between ethnic minority values and value-expressive behavioral intentions

  2025cites this paper
• Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought

  2025cites this paper
• Fictive Learning in Model-based Reinforcement Learning by Generalized Reward Prediction Errors

  2025cites this paper
• Demystifying AI for the Workforce: The Role of Explainable AI in Worker Acceptance and Management Relations

  2025cites this paper
• "I could have done otherwise": the neural bases of counterfactual representations.

  2025cites this paper
• Failed charity fundraising and strengthened benevolence: the counterfactual thinking effect in fundraising outcome feedback

  2025cites this paper
• Age differences in what-if thinking from midlife onwards: Prefrontal contribution and implications for emotional health in late life.

  2025cites this paper
• Type-agnostic and form-oriented deductive conclusion generation

  2025cites this paper
• Executable Counterfactuals: Improving LLMs' Causal Reasoning Through Code

  2025cites this paper
• How the incidental emotions of anger and guilt influence our judgments

  2025cites this paper
• Collective future thinking in Cultural Dynamics

  2025cites this paper
• How is counterfactual thinking integrated in organizational risk and resilience practices?

  2024cites this paper
• An investigation of the effect of logical structures on Chinese preschool children's counterfactual reasoning development.

  2024cites this paper
• Negative Career Goal Discrepancy and Goal Adjustment in Young Adults: The Underlying Mechanism of Negative Emotions

  2024cites this paper
• Embodied Meaning in Comprehending Abstract Chinese Counterfactuals

  2024cites this paper
• Non-single dating app use and the cognitive and psychological mechanisms of infidelity: gender differences

  2024cites this paper
• The relationship between life regrets and well-being: a systematic review

  2024cites this paper
• Dodging the autocratic bullet: enlisting behavioural science to arrest democratic backsliding

  2024cites this paper
• Eyes Can Deceive: Benchmarking Counterfactual Reasoning Abilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models

  2024cites this paper
• Working Too Hard or Not Hard Enough?

  2024cites this paper
• An Investigation of the Associations Between Counterfactual Reasoning and Executive Functions in Chinese Preschool Children

  2024cites this paper
• The recursive grammar of mental time travel

  2024cites this paper
• Processing of prosodic cues of uncertainty in autistic and non-autistic adults: a study based on articulatory speech synthesis

  2024cites this paper
• Who is Responsible? Explaining Safety Violations in Multi-Agent Cyber-Physical Systems

  2024cites this paper
• Counterfactual Token Generation in Large Language Models

  2024cites this paper
• Last‐Mile Delivery: A Process View, Framework, and Research Agenda

  2024cites this paper
• Individual differences and counterfactual thinking

  2024cites this paper
• A Configurational Perspective on the Quality of Managers’ Counterfactual Reflections

  2024influential citation
• The trap of presumed equivalence: Artificial General Intelligence should not be assessed on the scale of human intelligence

  2024cites this paper
• The existence of manual mode increases human blame for AI mistakes.

  2024cites this paper
• The varying effects of benefit types on community members' views of whether they gain from wildlife

  2024cites this paper
• From Feature Importance to Natural Language Explanations Using LLMs with RAG

  2024cites this paper
• For the sake of curiosity: Humans but not capuchins (Sapajus apella) collect counterfactual information on a computerized gambling task

  2024influential citation
• Guiding community discussions on human–water challenges by serious gaming in the upper Ewaso Ngiro River basin, Kenya

  2024cites this paper
• Whose Pants Are on Fire? Journalists Correcting False Claims are Distrusted More Than Journalists Confirming Claims

  2024cites this paper
• Possible Worlds Theory: How the Imagination Transcends and Recreates Reality.

  2024cites this paper
• The interactive effects of self- and parent-referenced career goal discrepancies on young adults’ career indecision

  2024cites this paper
• AGE MATTERS: THE EFFECT OF REGRET AND LOSS AVERSION ON CULTURED MEAT ACCEPTANCE.

  2024cites this paper
• Promoting Adolescent Safer Gambling Through Self-Referent Counterfactual Thinking and Knowledge of Probabilistic Outcome

  2024cites this paper
• Putting maximization dimensions and well-being in a daily context: The moderating role of choice domains and characteristics

  2024cites this paper
• The model of ambivalent choice and dissonant commitment: An integration of dissonance and ambivalence frameworks

  2024cites this paper
• Look Back, Not Ahead? Time Use and the Value of Revisiting Past Experiences

  2024cites this paper
• Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic

  2024cites this paper
• The Dynamic Temporal Sequence and Reflexive Adjustment Behavior: Foundations for a Behavioral Alternative to Optimization Theory

  2024cites this paper
• Implicit theories of health predict influenza vaccination intention among elder Chinese: The mediating role of anticipated regret

  2024cites this paper
• Wondering about the Impossible: On the Semantics of Counterpossibles

  2024cites this paper
• Counterfactual thoughts in complex causal domain: content, benefits, and implications for their function

  2024cites this paper
• Memory control immediately improves unpleasant emotions associated with autobiographical memories of past immoral actions

  2024cites this paper
• Counterfactual thinking induces different neural patterns of memory modification in anxious individuals

  2024cites this paper
• Overcoming resistance to belief revision and correction of misinformation beliefs: psychophysiological and behavioral effects of a counterfactual mindset

  2024cites this paper
• Feeling our place in the world: an active inference account of self-esteem

  2024cites this paper
• What if...?: Thinking Counterfactual Keywords Helps to Mitigate Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models

  2024cites this paper
• Evaluating the Usefulness of Counterfactual Explanations from Bayesian Networks

  2024cites this paper
• The asymmetric impact of decision-making confidence on regret and relief

  2024cites this paper
• ‘My child could have died’: counterfactual thoughts and psychological distress in parents of trauma survivors

  2024cites this paper
• Counterfactual Explanation of a Classification Model for Detecting SQL Injection Attacks

  2024cites this paper
• Supporting human factors and ergonomics professionals in anticipating future work changes in response to the anthropocene

  2024cites this paper
• The potential role of psychological time in the study of violent radicalisation, deradicalisation, and disengagement

  2024cites this paper
• Up and down: counterfactual closeness is robust to direction of comparison

  2024cites this paper
• Temporal comparisons shape system justification processes

  2024cites this paper
• An exploratory study on counterfactual thinking in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

  2023influential citation
• A counterfactual thinking perspective of moral licensing effect in machine-driven communication: An example of natural language processing chatbot developed based on WeChat API

  2023cites this paper
• Do both anticipated relief and anticipated regret predict decisions about influenza vaccination?

  2023cites this paper
• Individualism-Collectivism (I-C) indices do not mediate the negative association between non-referent downward counterfactual thinking and prevention pride in Australian university students

  2023cites this paper
• Counterfactual thinking may attenuate polarization of COVID‐19 prevention behavior

  2023cites this paper
• Young children experience both regret and relief in a gain-or-loss context

  2023cites this paper
• Citizen expectations, agency reputation and public service quality

  2023cites this paper
• Best practices for weight at work research

  2023cites this paper
• “Trust yourself and your body”: advice from fat individuals on how to navigate fat fertility, pregnancy, and birth

  2023cites this paper
• Psychology of the possible and possibilistic thinking

  2023cites this paper
• When do I ponder? The role of elaboration in counterfactual thinking

  2023cites this paper
• Do tufted capuchin monkeys, Sapajus spp., experience regret in decision making under risk?

  2023cites this paper