Counterfactual thinking

Social Cognition
This topic deals with how we process and store information about people. It covers areas such as how our mind works; how we reconstruct memory, heuristics and biases we deal with in daily judgments, counterfactual thinking, and the effects of emotion and motives on social cognition.

Counterfactual thinking
I have chosen to focus on counterfactual thinking in this blog entry. Counterfactual thinking involves thinking about how events in the past could have turned out differently. Counterfactual thinking may be said to be a form of thinking that is not based on facts as it involves thinking about memories in a way that is not very accurate.

Counterfactual thinking is a form of social cognition that may or may not involve others.

Upward counterfactual thinking is looking back and thinking about how things could have been better.

Downward counterfactual thinking is looking back and thinking about how things could have been worse.

My Personal Experience
When I was in junior college, I experienced a lot of personal problems and as a result, I failed all my tests and exams and ended up repeating my first year. This was a very difficult experience. I was unable to recover from my problems quickly enough, and barely made it through my A levels. Consequently, I only passed marginally.

Having been a strong student previously in secondary school, I was deeply disappointed in my performance and felt rather depressed. As a result of my poor performance, I was unable to get into any Singaporean university together with all my other classmates.

Following that, I entered polytechnic and studied there for another three years. I emerged with my diploma. Following that, I joined JCUS and have been studying here ever since.

Despite knowing that my problems had definitely been too large to handle when I was in junior college, I engaged in extensive upward counterfactual thinking after my A levels. I blamed myself for going off track, and falling so far behind my other classmates who had all gotten into university and had started working by the time I got into JCUS. I kept thinking that if I could have just coped better with my problems, have been more resourceful and disciplined, I would not have wasted three years in junior college coming out with only a pass.

As a result of this fruitless thinking, I ended up even more depressed and spent much time just mentally punishing myself.

Fortunately, I slowly managed to recover and focus on my work and I ended up doing well in polytechnic and making it into JCUS. Thoughts that if I had tried harder I would not have had to waste so much time still haunt me, and I still have trouble letting go of the past. However, thankfully it is currently much less persistent.

After studying this topic, I realize that I should stop engaging in upward counterfactual thinking and engage in more downward counterfactual thinking in regards to this situation. Downward counterfactual thinking would make me feel much better about my situation, and upward counterfactual thinking does not help at all, as there is nothing I can change about the past.

I should focus on how fortunate I was to be able to get into polytechnic and JCUS, and how I have had an opportunity unlike most people to have been able to experience both polytechnic and junior college, and to have learnt so much more.

I have also realized that upward counterfactual thinking can be very useless and it can only serve to make things worse and prevent a person from moving on. I now realize how much time I wasted tormenting myself unnecessarily.