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4.3.3 Counterfactual Thinking : 
Suppose your friend applies for a specific college and fail to 
get admission because of less merit. You quickly think that ‘he 
should have studied more’. If you know that somebody met with an 
accident and you think ‘what if he wouldn’t have started at that time. 
This is typically known as counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual 
thinking is thinking about a past that did not happen. It is tendency 
to imagine other outcomes in the situation than the once that have 
occurred. Counterfactual thinking is not just limited to the negative 
events. It is wide range of automatic thinking that influences our 
social cognition.
Counterfactual thinking is thinking about a past that did not 
happen. It is tendency to imagine other outcomes in the situation 
than the one’s that have occurred. 
Counterfactual literally means ‘contrary to the facts’. The 
term counterfactual thinking refers to a set of cognitions involving 
the simulation of alternatives to past or present factual events or 
circumstances. Suppose, two of your friends failed in unit test 
because they did not study well. Since the outcome is similar, you 
should feel similar sympathy for them. Now, imagine that A 
otherwise studies regularly, and B rarely studies. Now for whom 
you will have more sympathy..? You think of alternatives for the 
behavior of A than B and feel more sympathetic for him.
Counterfactual thinking is a very strong bias in thinking. In 
order to get rid of counterfactual thinking one need to suppress 
counterfactual thoughts or discount them.
Counterfactual thinking can be beneficial or costly for the 
user depending on how it is used. Suppose you have missed a top 
position in your class by one point. You think that ‘you could have 
done better’ or ‘least you retained second position in class’, you are 
engaging in two different types of counterfactual thoughts: upward 
and downward. This is one useful classification of counterfactuals is 
based on their direction of comparison (Roese, 1994). 
Counterfactuals may result in alternative circumstances that are 
evaluatively better than actual (i.e., upward counterfactuals) or 
evaluatively worse than actual (i.e., downward counterfactuals).
Often, regret can be confused with counterfactual thinking. 
Regret is an emotion whereas counterfactual thinking is thought.