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Upward counterfactuals have a greater preparative function and focus on future improvement, while downward counterfactuals are used as a coping mechanism in an affective function. Furthermore, additive counterfactuals have shown greater potential to induce behavioral intentions of improving performance. [16]
Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Research Tool (archived link)—Academic discussion of counterfactuals in history, and suggested ground rules for their use Counterfactual History: A User's Guide (archived link), by Martin Bunzl from The American Historical Review
The most immediate task concerning counterfactuals is that of explaining their truth-conditions. As a start, one might assert that background information is assumed when stating and interpreting counterfactual conditionals and that this background information is just every true statement about the world as it is (pre-counterfactual).
Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood. Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language.
Downward counterfactuals, thinking about ways in which things could have gone worse, are linked with positive affect. Self-blame that assesses how a negative event could be avoided would be upward counterfactual thinking, so this theory hypothesizes that self-blame results in negative affect and poor adjustment.
These cases are known as upward counterfactuals, in contrast to downward counterfactuals, in which the counterfactual scenario is worse than actuality. [ 138 ] [ 136 ] Upward counterfactual thinking is usually experienced as unpleasant, since it presents the actual circumstances in a bad light.
Encouraging people to explicitly think about the counterfactuals was an effective means of reducing the hindsight bias. [54] In other words, people became less attached to the actual outcome and were more open to consider alternative lines of reasoning prior to the event.
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