The effects of counterfactual thinking and regulatory focus on creative problem solving

This study explored the effects of counterfactual structure generation on both a creative association task and a creative generation task when people are in a particular regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) under goal closure. People with a promotion focus tend to perform better on various types of problem-solving tasks compared to people with a prevention focus. Of special interest is whether there is a way to improve creative performance in people with a prevention focus using counterfactual thinking.;Regulatory focus was first induced through a manipulation paradigm. Participants then generated either a subtractive counterfactual or an additive counterfactual in response to a story and subsequently completed the creative task. Experiment 1 explored whether relational processing elicited by subtractive counterfactual generation would lead to better performance on a creative association task compared to expansive processing elicited by additive counterfactual generation. The results were in line with this hypothesis. Further, the results suggest that this effect may be seen in people with a promotion focus, but there was no difference in performance based on counterfactual structure for people with a prevention focus. Experiment 2 explored whether expansive processing elicited by additive counterfactual generation would lead to better performance on a creative generation task compared to relational processing elicited by subtractive counterfactual generation. The results were in line with this hypothesis. Further, the results showed no evidence that regulatory focus had an effect on the creative task. Also, given that different types of counterfactual thoughts might reinforce a particular regulatory focus, another goal was to explore whether regulatory focus mediates the relationship between counterfactual thinking and creative problem solving. However, no support was found for this in either experiment. Limitations of the experiment and implications of the results are discussed.