Counterfactual Thinking and Relative Satisfaction

William James, 1892, p. 186

A person’s objective achievements often matter less than how those accomplishments are subjectively construed. Being one of the best in the world can mean little if it is coded not as a triumph over many, but as a loss to one. Being second best may not be as gratifying as perhaps it should.

Since James’s time, of course, this idea has been both theoretically enriched and extensively documented. Social psychologists have shown that people’s satisfaction with their objective circumstances is greatly affected by how their own circumstances compare with those of relevant others (Festinger, 1954; Suls & Miller, 1977; Taylor & Lobel, 1989). A 5% merit raise can be quite exhilarating until one learns that the person down the hall received an 8% increase. Psychologists have also demonstrated that satisfaction with an outcome likewise depends on how it compares with a person’s original expectations (Atkinson, 1964; Feather, 1967, 1969). Someone who receives a 5% raise might be happier than someone who receives an 8% increase if the former expected less than the latter. Often it is the difference between the actual outcome and the expected outcome, or the actual outcome and the outcomes of others that is decisive (Crosby, 1976; Olson, Herman, & Zanna, 1986).

More recently, psychologists have discovered a third way in which the determinants of satisfaction are relative. In particular, people seem to be greatly affected by how their objective outcomes compare to imagined outcomes that “might have been” (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982b; Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993; Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1990; Roese, 1994; Roese & Olson, 1995). The intensity of people’s reactions to events appears to be proportional to how easy it is to conjure up greater or lesser outcomes that “almost happened.” An 8% return on one’s investment might exceed expectations and yet be disappointing if one is reminded of an alternative investment one “almost” made that yielded a substantially higher return. The critical comparison in this case is a postcomputed response to what has occurred, rather than a precomputed representation of what seems likely, ex ante, to occur (Kahneman & Miller, 1986).

Most of the research on counterfactual thinking has held outcome constant and examined the reactions of people contemplating different counterfactual alternatives. For example, Kahneman and Tversky (1982b) asked their participants to imagine the reactions of two travelers who both missed their scheduled flights, one by 5 minutes and the other by 30 minutes. The outcome is the same – both must wait for the next flight – but it is easier to imagine a counterfactual world in which the first traveler arrives on time. Studies such as this have repeatedly shown that the same outcome can produce strikingly different reactions as a function of the ease of generating various counterfactual alternatives (Johnson, 1986; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a, 1982b; Miller & McFarland, 1986; Miller et al., 1990; Turnbull, 1981; Wells & Gavanski, 1989).

We wished to take this a step further. We were interested in whether the effects of different counterfactual comparisons are sufficiently strong to cause people who are objectively worse off to sometimes feel better than those in a superior state. Moreover, we were interested not just in documenting isolated episodes in which this might happen, but in identifying a specific situation in which it occurs with regularity and predictability. The domain we chose to investigate was athletic competition.

We chose this domain of investigation because in athletic competition outcomes are typically defined with unusual precision. Someone finishes first, second, or third, for example, thereby earning a gold, silver, or bronze medal. With all else equal, one would expect the athletes’ levels of satisfaction to mirror this objective order. We suspected, however, that all else is not equal – that the nature of athletes’ counterfactual thoughts might cause their levels of satisfaction to depart from this simple, linear order.

Consider the counterfactual thoughts of bronze and silver medalists. What might their most compelling counterfactual thoughts be? One would certainly expect the silver medalist to focus on almost winning the gold because there is a qualitative difference between coming in first and any other outcome. Each event has only one winner, and to that victor belongs the considerable spoils that the modern commercial-athletic world bestows (Frank & Cook, 1995). Moreover, for the silver medalist, this exalted status was only one step away. To be sure, the silver medalist also finished only one step from winning a bronze, but such a downward social comparison does not involve much of a change in status (i.e., neither the bronze nor silver medalist won the event, but both won medals), and thus does not constitute as much of a counterfactual temptation.

In contrast, bronze medalists are likely to focus their counterfactual thoughts downward. Like the qualitative jump between silver and gold, there is a categorical difference between finishing third and finishing fourth. Third place merits a medal whereas the fourth-place finisher is just one of the field. This type of categorical difference does not exist in the upward comparison between second and third place.

Because of this asymmetry in the direction of counterfactual comparison, the person who is objectively worse off (the bronze medalist) might nonetheless feel more gratified than the person who is objectively better off (the silver medalist). Like William James’s (1892) pugilist, silver medalists may torment themselves with counterfactual thoughts of “If only . . .” or “Why didn’t I just . . .” Bronze medalists, in contrast, may be soothed by the thought that “At least I won a medal.” The net result is that with respect to athletic competition, there may be times when less is more.

We conducted three studies to examine this question. First, we analyzed the affective reactions of bronze and silver medalists as they won their medals in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. Second, we had participants evaluate the Olympians’ postcompetition interviews to see whether silver medalists seemed to be focused on the medal they almost won, whereas third-place finishers appeared to relish the pleasure simply of being medalists. In the third study, we asked athletes themselves about the nature of their counterfactual thoughts.