AIDS prevention among young people. Yet another perspective on the topic was offered by authors who addressed the functions of counterfactual thinking, and attempted to determine what purpose is served by ruminating over events that cannot be changed. McMullen, Markman and Gavanski (Chapter 5) discuss how counterfactual thinking may contribute to a sense of control; Roese and Olson (Chapter 6) discuss the role of counterfactual thinking in preparing for future situations, and Davis and Lehman (Chapter 13) propose that counterfactual thinking may help to make sense of tragic events.
Two chapters address possible individual differences in counterfactual thinking, albeit from radically different perspectives. Kasmatis and Wells (Chapter 3) examine the relation of counterfactual thinking to traditional personality constructs, such as optimism and selfesteem. In contrast, Landman (Chapter 8) offers an analysis grounded in literary traditions. She argues that broad world views, corresponding roughly to the literary categories of romance, comedy, tragedy and irony, may form a relatively stable part of a person's outlook, and may interact with both counterfactual attributions and the resulting regret.
However, perhaps the most interesting findings to emerge from this book concern the potential discrepancy between results obtained in the laboratory, and those derived from field studies. For example, laboratory studies reliably indicate that in constructing counterfactual alternatives, people are more likely to change extraordinary, rather than mundane events, and to feel more regret over acts of commission than omission. In contrast, field work by Davis and Lehman (Chapter 13) showed that when faced with a tragic loss, people are just as likely to mutate mundane as extraordinary events, and Gilovich and Medvec (Chapter 9) demonstrated that, when reminiscing about their lives, people are likely to regret the things they haven't done more than the things they have done. In addition, Davis and Lehman were able to demonstrate that contrary to accepted wisdom, counterfactual thinking may be separate from causal attribution. For example, parents who have lost a child to crib death may acknowledge that they did not cause the child to die, and yet construct counterfactual alternatives in which their actions may have prevented the death from occurring (e.g., if only I had looked in more often . . . ). In his summary remarks, Kahneman (Chapter 14) offers some interesting hypotheses on how these apparent discrepancies may be resolved.
In overview, this is a technical but readable book that is likely to serve as a useful reference for researchers in a variety of areas. Scholars interested in causal attributions, motivation, judgement and decision making, and reasoning, whether from a social psychological, cognitive, philosophical, or linguistic perspective, are all likely to find at least one of these chapters to be informative. Moreover, its utility for scholars outside the domain is greatly enhanced by the first (Roese and Olson) and last (Kahneman) chapters. Roese and Olson's introduction provides the reader with sufficient background to make sense of the chapters that follow, and to place them in context, and Kahneman's concluding remarks provide a good summary of the issues raised in the intervening chapters, and sets out some interesting questions for future work.