CounterfactualProcessingofNormaland-Iastate.PDFVIP

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 25, 314-325 (1989) Counterfactual Processing of Normal and Exceptional Events IGOR GAVANSKI Indiana University AND GARY L. WELLS University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Received June 17, 1988 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 simdation 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 cor- respondence 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 norm