The One About My Roommate, the Missed Question, and Counterfactual Thinking

When thinking about writing this blog, I kept hitting a brick wall. With concepts like priming and attribution theories to discuss, I could think of a million little example, but nothing I felt I could expand on. I almost decided to just skip this week’s blog, until my roommate came home with a story to tell.


Last week, my roommate became sick, which is bad enough. Unfortunately for her, she also had her first test in an important class that week. She contemplated not going, but decided she was well enough to go and she didn’t want to stress about the test anymore. Walking into our apartment today, I was met with my roommate, who told me they received their graded tests today. After asking her how she did, my roommate got a sad look on her face and said she would have had a perfect score, but she had accidently skipped one of the short essay questions.

After trying to reassure her that she could bounce back from this and do better on future tests, my roommate lamented that what bothered her most was that she knew the question. That she could have easily gotten a perfect score, but for whatever reason, perhaps due to her being sick, she had glazed over that one question. She went on to say she wouldn’t be so mad at herself if she didn’t actually know the question because then she could tell herself it didn’t matter that she had skipped the question because she didn’t know it anyway. She then fumed about the different scenarios that could have gotten her a better score. Maybe if she had looked over the test one more time. Maybe if she had waited till she had felt better to take the test, she would have been more attentive. The list goes on. Sadly for my roommate, no matter how many scenarios she thinks up, she still skipped the question.

What my roommate is suffering from is Counterfactual Thinking, which is part of a bigger concept, Cognitive Heuristics. Specifically, Cognitive Heuristics are information-processing tools that are usually helpful in allowing us to quickly and efficiently think about the world around us, but can lead us astray (Gilovich, Grifin, & Kahneman, 2002; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). There are several different heuristic tools we use, but the one I’m focusing on in this blog is Counterfactual Thinking, which is the inclination of a person to think of the different possible outcomes, that did not occur, of an event (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Furthermore, research has shown that the alternative outcomes we come up with affect how we feel about the event (Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1995). In other words, if we imagine more positive alternates, we feel disappointed or frustrated with the actual outcome, but if we imagine negative outcomes, we usually feel more relieved or satisfied with the actual outcome. Moreover, certain situations make it easier to conjure up other possible outcomes, such as situations where we are on the verge of a better or worse outcome or just below a cutoff point (Medvec & Savitsky, 1997).

So for my roommate, the fact the she was so close to a perfect score made the situation even worse and much easier to think of different outcomes. If she had made a worse score, it might have made it easier for her to let it go and just tell herself to study and focus more next time. Furthermore, her feelings of anger and disappointment are explained by the fact that she was focusing on more positive alternatives, such as answering the last question, than on negative outcomes, such as missing more than just the one question. Had she thought of all the worse alternative outcomes, she might have felt better about the grade she received.

Gilovich, T., Grifin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.). (2002) Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D., & Miller, D.T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136-153.

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Medvec, V.H., & Savitsky, K. (1997). When doing better means feeling worse: The effects of categorical cutoff points on counterfactual thinking and satisfaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1284-1296.

Nisbett, R.E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inferences: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Roese, N.J. (1997). Counterfactual thinking. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 133-148.
 Roese, N.J., & Olson, J.M. (Eds.). (1995). What might have been: The social psychology of counterfactual thinking. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.