Ideals and Violations
The availability of counterfactual alternatives is influenced by distance from an ideal: improvements (moving toward an ideal) are more readily imagined than deteriorations, making them more salient in mental simulations.
THE IDEA
Ideals and Violations
Barsalou (1985) and Lakoff (1987) have emphasized the role of distance from an ideal or paragon as a determinant of typicality. For example, zero‑calorie foods are judged to be highly typical members of the category “Things to eat on a diet,” although they are neither the most common nor the most similar to the prototypical diet food (Barsalou, 1985). In the terms of the present model, elements that have ideal values on significant attributes appear to be highly available. A hypothesis about differential mutability follows: When an alternative to an event could be produced either by introducing an improvement in some antecedent or by introducing a deterioration, the former will be more available.
Evidence for this proposition was obtained in unpublished research by Read (1985). Subjects were taught the rules of a simple two‑person card game. They were then shown pictures of the players’ hands and were asked to complete the blanks in the following statement by changing one card: ”The outcome would have been different if the________had been a_______.” The question of interest was whether the subjects would choose to weaken the winning hand or to strengthen the losing one. The rule discussed in the preceding section suggests that the winning hand might be more readily altered because the strongest combinations (e.g., four of a kind) are more exceptional than weaker ones (e.g., three of a kind). However, the tendency to eliminate exceptions was overcome in the data by a tendency to approach an ideal value. In a significant majority of cases, subjects chose to modify the outcome by strengthening the losing hand rather than by weakening the stronger one. Informal observations of spectators at sports events suggest that the outcome of a contest is more commonly undone by improving the losing performance (e.g., imagining the successful completion of a long pass in the last few seconds) than by imagining a poorer performance of the winning team.
Differential availability of changes that improve or degrade a performance could be one of the factors that explain the answers to the following question:
Tom and Jim were both eliminated from a tennis tournament, both on a tie‑breaker. Tom lost when his opponent served an ace. Jim lost on his own unforced error. Who will spend more time thinking about the match that night?
Note that Tom and Jim could both imagine themselves winning the game, but the judgment of our subjects is that these thoughts are likely to be more available when they involve an imagined improvement of one’s own performance than an imagined deterioration of the opponent’s game.
When to use it
When analyzing a failure, use this bias to check whether you are overly focused on your own mistakes to the exclusion of external factors, leading to unfair self‑blame.
In negotiations, anticipate that your counterpart may generate more vivid counterfactuals about improving their own position than about worsening yours, which can affect their satisfaction and future demands.
In coaching or feedback, use the insight that people naturally imagine improvements rather than deteriorations; frame feedback as a path toward an ideal rather than as a correction of errors.
Evaluating a claim that design “defaults” embody an ideal: distinguish ease of imagining an alternative from evidence that users will choose it.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Card Game Experiment
In a study by Read (1985), subjects were given a two‑person card game and asked to change one card to alter the outcome. They overwhelmingly chose to strengthen the losing hand rather than weaken the winning hand, illustrating a bias toward improvements (moving toward an ideal).
Tennis Match Scenario
Tom loses when his opponent serves an ace; Jim loses on his own unforced error. People predict that Jim will spend more time thinking about the match because imagining improving one’s own performance (eliminating the error) is more available than imagining the opponent playing worse.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Think about a recent personal disappointment. Did you find yourself imagining how you could have done better, or how someone else could have performed worse? Which was more vivid?
In a competitive situation (sports, work, etc.), do you tend to focus on improving your own performance or on reducing your opponent’s strengths? How does this affect your mental simulations?
Can you identify a category (e.g., “healthy foods”) where the most typical members are actually ideals rather than the most common examples? How does the ideal influence your judgments?
Often confused with
References
- Barsalou, L. W. (1985). Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories. — Barsalou (1985)
- Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. — Lakoff (1987)
- Read, D. (1985). Unpublished research on mutability in counterfactual reasoning. — Read (1985)
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Heuristics and Biases The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, Daniel Kahneman)