"If Only" in America: Counterfactual Thinking in Response to Politicized Negative Events

Abstract

In this dissertation, I share seven studies detailing how counterfactual thinking relates to partisan affiliation, cultural orientation, policy support, and normative beliefs. In Study 1, I identify a partisan pattern to counterfactual thinking such that Democrats are more likely to mention public policies as potential solutions that might have prevented negative events from occurring, whereas Republicans are more likely to mention the actions of individuals or private groups such as families or companies. In Studies 1-3, I show that a communitarian cultural orientation, defined as a preference for societal intervention in problem-solving, predicts mentioning public policies in counterfactual statements. On the other hand, an individualist cultural orientation, defined as a preference for non-intervention, predicts mentioning individuals as the primary problem-solvers responsible for preventing politicized negative events. In Studies 2 and 3, I show that counterfactual thinking predicts policy support such that the more likely a person is to mention a public policy as a potential solution to a negative event, the more they tend to support policies aimed at addressing relevant societal issues.

In Chapter 3, I describe two studies showing that counterfactual thinking about politicized topics is resistant to norm-based manipulations that typically influence apolitical counterfactual thinking. Specifically, telling participants that a policy (versus non-policy) solution came “barely too late” to prevent a negative event did not make them more likely to mention policies in their counterfactual statements. Instead, partisan affiliation predicted counterfactual content and policy support, and participants tended to mention policy solutions that they supported.

In Chapter 4, I discuss how partisans differ in their normative beliefs about the United States and the world at large, and how these differences in norm perceptions are related to counterfactual responses to national tragedies. In Study 6, I show that partisans hold different descriptive normative beliefs, with Democrats viewing it as more common for guns to be sold and kept irresponsibly, for Americans to be poor or homeless, and for countries around the world to have single-payer healthcare. I also show that normative beliefs predict counterfactual content: participants are more likely to wish for policy solutions after reading about mass shootings and homelessness when they see irresponsible gun behavior and poverty as more common in the United States. They are also more likely to wish for policy solutions to healthcare inaccessibility when they see single-payer healthcare and price caps on medications as more common policies worldwide. In other words, participants wished for policy solutions when they saw misfortune as widespread. They also wished for policies that they thought other countries had.

In Study 7, I used two manipulations to shift participants’ normative beliefs, but found that participants showed reactance to these manipulations. Even among participants who complied with the research task, results did not support a causal relationship between descriptive normative beliefs and counterfactual content. In Chapter 5, I discuss the implications of this work for political policy, polarization, and gridlock, as well as highlight possible avenues for future research.