Counterfactual thinking and ascriptions of cause and preventability.

By David R. Mandel, D. Lehman. 1996

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Reasoning counterfactually: making inferences about things that didn't happen. (2002, background): “In particular, counterfactual and causal thinking have been closely linked by philosophers (e.g., Chisholm, 1946; Mackie, 1974) and psychologists (e.g., Mandel & Lehman, 1996; Roese, 1997).”
Avoiding Future Regret in Purchase-Timing Decisions (2001, background): “Similarly, Mandel and Lehman (1996) find that thinking about how an outcome could have been prevented tends to generate more counterfactual reasoning than thinking about the cause of an outcome.”
Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought (2008, background): “…that in response to a stressful experience, people think repetitively about their experience in order to work it through, make sense of it, and integrate it into their beliefs and assumptions about the world (Harber & Pennebaker, 1992; Horowitz, 1986; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Tait & Silver, 1989).”
Depression, Control, and Counterfactual Thinking: Functional for Whom? (2006, background): “Recent work (e.g., Mandel, 2003; Mandel & Lehman, 1996) has indicated that counterfactual thinking and causal attribution are often divergent processes.”
Effect of Counterfactual and Factual Thinking on Causal Judgments (2003, background): “Participants first read the following vignette (cf. Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Mandel & Lehman, 1996): Mr. Jones is 47 years old, the father of three and a successful banking executive.”
Learning to Understand the Forms of Causality Implicit in Scientifically Accepted Explanations (2003, background): “…Delforge & Early, 1989; Vinokur & Ajzen, 1982), others saying the latest event is viewed as causal (e.g. Miller & Gunasegaram, 1990) and others saying that the event that covaries most consistently (Mandel & Lehman, 1996) or without which the event probably would not have occurred (Spellman, 1997).”
Self-Blame Among Sexual Assault Victims Prospectively Predicts Revictimization: A Perceived Sociolegal Context Model of Risk (2007, background): “…thinking literature highlights that an SA victim may generate ‘‘if only’’ inferences (e.g., ‘‘if only I had not gone to that party . . . ,’’ ‘‘if only I had not had so much to drink . . . ’’) in an effort to understand how her negative experience might have been prevented (Mandel & Lehman, 1996).”
The functional theory of counterfactual thinking : New evidence, new challenges, new insights (2017, background): “with significant qualifications and additions appearing in Markman and McMullen (2003). The updated version that named the functional theory of counterfactual thinking in its title (Epstude & Roese, 2008) is the immediate precursor to the present paper.”
The Effects of Queue Structure on Attitudes (2002, background): “Moreover, SQ structures clearly prescribe actions and behavior throughout the wait, but MQ structures can invite counterfactual (or what-if) thinking (Mandel and Lehman 1996; Roese 1997).”
Counterfactual thinking: The temporal order effect (2004, background): “People are more likely to undo exceptional than routine events (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982), actions than inactions (e.g., Byrne & McEleney, 2000; Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; N’gbala & Branscombe, 1995), controllable than uncontrollable events (Girotto, Legrenzi, & Rizzo, 1991; Mandel & Lehman, 1996; M”
Learning Agility: In Search of Conceptual Clarity and Theoretical Grounding (2012, background): “A second cognitive process that both supports and is a manifestation of an individual’s learning agility is the practice of counterfactual thinking, which is a retrospective form of cognitive simulation (Mandel & Lehman, 1996; Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993; Sanna, 2000).”