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At one time or another like most people you may possibly reflect on just how things could have been “if you had done things differently”. Looking back you may regret the path you took, and think about the “if only scenarios”.  For instance if only I had become a doctor instead of a lawyer, moved here 10 years ago, bought that house”….

Psychologists  refer to this process of how we evaluate attempts to answer “what if” questions  as  ”counterfactual thinking”. This process more often than not can be patterns of response that cause us to hold  on to feelings of regret and disappointment.

Researcher Vittorio Girotto, and his colleagues at the University IUAV of Venice, have recently published research which contends that our counter factual thinking may be markedly different when we are actually experiencing failure rather than reading about someone else’s.
Most previous studies have investigated the way in which readers think about fictional stories, rather than the way in which actors think about events they have actually experienced. We assume that an individual’s role (actor vs. reader) can make different information available, which in turn can affect counter factual thinking. Hence, we predict a role effect. In eight studies, we show that readers undo the negative outcome of a story by undoing the protagonist’s choice to tackle a given problem, rather than her unsuccessful attempt to solve it. But actors who make the same choice and experience the same negative outcome as the protagonist alter problem features. We also show that the effect does not depend on motivational factors. These results contradict current accounts of counter factual thinking and demonstrate the necessity to investigate the counterfactual thoughts of individuals other than story readers”.
This research is published in the June 2007 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science .

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Source:  National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation
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