title: When to fire: anticipatory versus postevent reconstrual of uncontrollable events.
abstract: These 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 before hand 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 loosing 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA. tdw@virginia.edu
authors.forename: Timothy D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.forename: Thalia P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Wheatley
authors.forename: Jaime L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Kurtz
authors.forename: Elizabeth W
authors.initials: EW
authors.lastname: Dunn
authors.forename: Daniel T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Gilbert
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D013997:Time Factors