PSY325H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Positive Illusions, Smoke Detector, Counterfactual Thinking
Document Summary
Lecture 4. 4 self-esteem: how else do we satisfy the self-enhancement motive, self-serving comparisons, target of comparisons are different, downward social comparisons, comparing oneself to others who are performing worse than you are. Look around to find people who did worse than you and repair decrease. We won when raptors won but not we lost but they lost . July 16, 2020: counterfactual thinking, mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been, upward simulation, simulated alternative better than actuality, ex. If only i had made that last free-throw, we would have won the game . Imagining things better than they happened how action or inaction led to worse outcome and threatens self-esteem: downward simulation, simulated alternatives worse than actuality, ex. At least my smoke detector worked, or i might have been killed .
