ABSTRACT
Kelly (1970) suggested that an individual's mental construction of a situation guides his or her thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in that situation. However, findings from recent research have suggested that people not only construct current situations but also reconstruct past events. One way people might reconstruct past events is to engage in counterfactual thinking, which is a form of mental simulation in which a person imagines how some factual outcome might easily have turned out differently (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). For example, people might think "If only Ted Kennedy had not tried to drive Mary Jo Kopechne home that night, he might be President today."
