#9207. Comparing the functional benefits of counterfactual and prefactual thinking: the content-specific and content-neutral pathways

November 2026publication date
Proposal available till 14-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript6020 $

The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for
Journal’s subject area:
Philosophy;
Psychology (miscellaneous);
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology;
Places in the authors’ list:
place 1place 2place 3place 4
FreeFreeFreeFree
2510 $1340 $1170 $1000 $
Contract №9207.1 Contract №9207.2 Contract №9207.3 Contract №9207.4
1 place - free (for sale)
2 place - free (for sale)
3 place - free (for sale)
4 place - free (for sale)

Abstract:
We investigated the preparatory benefits of counterfactual and prefactual thinking towards cognitive task performance. We replicated the robust finding that individuals focus more on mutating internally controllable elements when thinking prefactually about their future task performance than when thinking counterfactually about a past performance. We also replicated the finding that counterfactual thinking was associated with significant performance improvement in an anagram task. We examined the relative performance-enhancing roles of counterfactuals and prefactuals in a subsequent unrelated analytical reasoning task.
Keywords:
Counterfactual thinking; performance improvement; prefactual thinking; preparatory function

Contacts :
0