A soccer team can give up a last-minute goal that is overturned after a check. The stock market may be approaching the point of collapse. Or tensions between two countries may reach the brink of violence before negotiations at the eleventh hour.
In each of these cases, the end result is not that bad. But people may still want to assign blame for this narrowly averted disaster. People may hold the football coach responsible for the fact that the team almost lost the game, for example, or lost confidence in the president who risked financial crisis or war.
Social psychologists refer to these “what if” scenarios as “counterfactual catastrophes.”
In a study of such counterfactual disasters, Matejas Makinmarketing PhD student at Kellogg, and Neil Roseprofessor of marketing at Kellogg, explored some of the factors that make people more likely to blame political leaders for near misses. They focused on the influence of US party alignment on this behavior because “they were really interested in seeing how deep the political polarization is,” says Mackin.
The researchers found that people were more likely to blame leaders for unreal disasters they believed almost happened than for disasters they did not believe were about to happen.
In addition, people in the US more readily blamed presidents of the opposing political party for counterfactual disasters. For example, Democrats were more likely to blame President Trump than President Biden for an imaginary nuclear attack, and vice versa.
“Our research shows that thinking about bad things that didn’t happen, yet could have, is a powerful contribution to moral reasoning,” says Roese. “The surprise to me was how much people can differ in how they think about alternative social outcomes that are worse than what has actually happened.”
Whatever scenarios
While previous research has shown why people blame targets (such as political leaders, in the current study) for negative events that have occurred, little is known about the relationship between blame and negative events that could have occurred but not.
To address this gap, Mackin, Roese, and colleagues, Daniel Efron of London Business School and Kai Epstude of the University of Groningen, conducted a series of experiments that examined counterfactual disasters in two different forms: “near” counterfactual disasters, or ones that were close to happening, and “far” counterfactual disasters, which seemed far from reality.
The researchers surveyed roughly equal numbers of Trump supporters and Biden supporters. They presented each participant with six counterfactual disasters that were either global, economic, or political in nature. These scenarios included events such as a third of the US population dying due to the Covid-19 pandemic and a nuclear attack by North Korea against the US None of the disasters actually happened during the Biden or Trump administrations.
For each of the six situations, participants read either that the disaster was “near” or “distant.” They then recorded an answer about either why they think the disaster almost happened or why it didn’t.
Participants then rated how much blame each president deserved for each of these six near misses. For example, one of the questions was: “How much blame does President Biden (Trump) deserve for almost allowing North Korea to launch a nuclear strike against the US?”
To blame or not to blame
The researchers found that the group that read the disaster disclaimer was more likely to say that the disasters were closer to happening—as would be expected.
Furthermore, people believed that a simulated disaster was closer to actually happening when it was under the watch of the president they opposed. As a result, people blamed imagined disasters more on the president they opposed than on the president they supported. And the effect was stronger for the group that received the disclaimer about “near” disasters.
It’s not uncommon for people to distort the facts when talking about politics, Roese explains. “Sometimes it reflects misunderstanding, sometimes deliberate deception. But this research goes further by showing how political belief can shape imagined alternatives and the moral conclusions drawn from those imaginings.”
The attribution of blame to events that didn’t actually happen is especially impressive, Mackin adds, especially when you consider that, “in principle, they didn’t happen.”
What about praise?
The team further investigated the reverse scenario: whether the right context could make people more likely to praise political leaders for ensuring that a controversial disaster did not occur on their watch. For example, “How much credit does President Biden (Trump) deserve for a cyber attack on US infrastructure by enemies of the US that was not under the President’s supervision?”
Contrary to what might be expected, the researchers found that participants did not give more praise to the leader they supported than to the leader they opposed.
“This is consistent with previous research showing that praise and blame have their own unique psychological mechanisms,” says Mackin.
The team believes further research is necessary to carefully examine why guilt but not praise was affected by the interaction between presidential support and the likelihood of counterfactual disasters occurring.
Taken together, the results highlight how adversarial destructive thinking could further entrench existing political attitudes and, in turn, fuel political polarization.
“It appears that many policy disputes may involve not only facts, but also the plausibility of imagined alternative outcomes of leadership decisions,” says Roese.
