Don’t Be Seduced by Counterfactuals
There’s a strange lure to thoughts like “what if…?” and “if only…”. When you skip a party to stay home with a movie, it’s natural to think “what if I’m missing out on the fun?”. And when you choose the party, you might think “wow it’s noisy here — if only I’d stayed home with a movie”.
These what-if scenarios are referred to as “counterfactuals”, and most of us are obsessed with them. Research is now starting to show just how seductive counterfactuals are and how much they can hurt you.
The pains of counterfactual curiosity
Earlier this year, a group of researchers from the UK and Japan published a study testing how much people would be tempted by the thought of what could have been.
Their experiment featured a game called the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). In this game, people watch a balloon and decide whether or not to hit a pump to inflate it. Every time they hit the pump, they slightly inflate the balloon and gain points that they can convert to cash after the experiment. The problem is they don’t know exactly when the balloon will burst, and the bursting point is selected at random between 1 and 12 pumps…
