Maloney, D.
Psychology department. Mary Immaculate College. Limerick, Ireland.
How we imagine what might have been, called counterfactual thinking, is influenced by several factors. Much of the existing literature has focused on the contextual or situational factors that goad people to think counterfactually. This research suggests that more extensively studied situational factors (e.g., how normal/controllable/mutable an event was) do not fully explain counterfactual thoughts, and investigates the role of personality and individual differences in how we construct alternative simulations of the past. Participants completed a series of difficult cognitive tasks (e.g. anagrams) and were then asked to think about how their performance on the tasks might have been better. Participants then repeated the cognitive tasks, and answered a battery of psychological personality measures. The results suggest that autonomy may be a particularly important personality trait in terms of counterfactual thinking and in how performance might improve as a result of considering alternative exemplars. Person’s high in autonomy generated significantly more self-regulating counterfactual thoughts than person’s low in autonomy and a greater total number of counterfactual thoughts than person’s low in autonomy. These results suggest that personality traits may influence both the activation and focus of counterfactual thinking. Results are discussed in relation to the functional theory of counterfactual thinking.