Department of Marketing, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Aug 14;15(8):e0237644. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237644. eCollection 2020.
Counterfactual thoughts center on how the past could have been different. Such thoughts may be differentiated in terms of direction of comparison, such that upward counterfactuals focus on how the past could have been better, whereas downward counterfactuals focus on how the past could have been worse. A key question is how such past-oriented thoughts connect to future-oriented individual differences such as optimism. Ambiguities surround a series of past studies in which optimism predicted relatively greater downward counterfactual thinking. Our main study (N = 1150) and six supplementary studies (N = 1901) re-examined this link to reveal a different result, a weak relation between optimism and upward (rather than downward) counterfactual thinking. These results offer an important correction to the counterfactual literature and are informative for theory on individual differences in optimism.
反事实思维集中在过去本可以如何不同。这些想法可以根据比较的方向进行区分，例如，向上的反事实思维集中在过去本可以如何更好，而向下的反事实思维集中在过去本可以如何更糟。一个关键问题是，这种面向过去的思维如何与乐观等面向未来的个体差异联系起来。一系列过去的研究存在模糊性，这些研究表明，乐观预测了相对更多的向下反事实思维。我们的主要研究（N=1150）和六项补充研究（N=1901）重新检验了这一联系，揭示了一个不同的结果，即乐观与向上（而不是向下）反事实思维之间的弱关系。这些结果为反事实文献提供了一个重要的修正，并为乐观的个体差异理论提供了信息。
