Counterfactual Thinking and Victim Compensation: A Test of Norm Theory

Explored an assumption of norm theory in the context of observers’ reactions to victims that the greater the availability of imagined alternatives to an event, the stronger will be the affective reaction elicited by the event. It was predicted that negative outcomes that strongly evoked positive alternatives would elicit more sympathy from observers than negative outcomes that weakly evoked positive alternatives. The ease of counterfactual thought was manipulated in Exp I, with 164 undergraduates, by the spatial distance between the negative outcome and a positive alternative, and in Exp II, with 25 Ss, by the habitualness of the actions that precipitated the victimization. Consistent with norm theory, Ss recommended more compensation for victims of fates for which a positive alternative was highly available.