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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
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When to Fire: Anticipatory Versus Postevent Reconstrual of Uncontrollable Events

Timothy D. Wilson

Thalia P. Wheatley

Jaime L. Kurtz

Elizabeth W. Dunn

University of Virginia

Daniel T. Gilbert

Harvard University

Three studies examined the conditions under which people engage in anticipatory construal before an evaluative event versus reconstrual after the event. Computer software informed college students that there was a 1.5%, 12%, 88%, or 98.5% chance that an opposite-sex student would pick them for a hypothetical date. When people had extreme expectations (1.5% or 98.5%), they changed their view of the student to be consistent with their expectations before learning the outcome (anticipatory reconstrual). When people had moderate expectations (12% or 88%), they formed relatively unbiased impressions beforehand but reconstrued after learning the outcome of the dating game (postevent reconstrual). Either strategy can ameliorate the pain of a negative event in ways that people do not anticipate. Forecasters predicted that losing would make them feel worse than it did and selected a higher dose of a drug to cope with an anticipated loss than did people who actually lost.

Key Words: coping • construal • expectations • rationalization • affective forecasting

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 3, 340-351 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167203256974
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