When Disaster Almost Strikes, Who Takes the Heat?

A soccer team may give up a last-minute goal that gets overturned on review. The stock market could approach the point of crashing. Or tensions between two countries may reach the brink of violence, before being negotiated back at the eleventh hour. 

In each of these cases, the ultimate result isn’t so bad. But people may still want to assign blame for this narrowly avoided disaster. People may hold the soccer coach responsible for the team almost losing the match, for example, or lose trust in the president who risked an economic crisis or war. 

Social psychologists refer to these what-if scenarios as “counterfactual catastrophes.” 

In a study of such counterfactual catastrophes, Matejas Mackin, a doctoral student of marketing at Kellogg, and Neal Roese, a professor of marketing at Kellogg, explored some of the factors that make people more likely to blame political leaders for the near misses. They focused on the influence of U.S. party alignment on this behavior because they were “really interested in seeing how deep political polarization is,” Mackin says.  

The researchers found that people were more likely to blame leaders for counterfactual catastrophes that they thought almost happened than for catastrophes that they did not think came close to occurring. 

What’s more, people in the U.S. more readily blamed counterfactual catastrophes on presidents of the opposing political party. For instance, Democrats were more inclined to blame President Trump than they were to blame President Biden for an imaginary nuclear attack, and vice versa.  

“Our research shows that thinking about bad things that did not happen, yet nevertheless could have happened, is a powerful input into moral reasoning,” Roese says. “The surprise for me was how much people can vary in the way they think about alternative societal outcomes that are worse than what has actually happened.” 

What-if scenarios 

While prior research has shown why people blame targets (such as political leaders, in the current study) for negative events that occurred, little is known about the relationship between blame and negative events that could have occurred but did not.  

To address this gap, Mackin, Roese, and their colleagues, Daniel Effron of London Business School and Kai Epstude of the University of Groningen, conducted a series of experiments that looked at counterfactual catastrophes in two different forms: “close” counterfactual catastrophes, or those that came close to occurring, and “distant” counterfactual catastrophes, which seemed distant from reality.  

The researchers surveyed a roughly equal number of Trump supporters and Biden supporters. They presented each participant with six counterfactual catastrophes that were either global, financial, or political in nature. These scenarios included events like a third of the U.S. population dying because of the Covid-19 pandemic and a nuclear attack by North Korea against the U.S. None of the catastrophes actually occurred during the Biden or Trump administrations.  

For each of the six cases, the participants read either that the catastrophe was “close” or “distant.” Then they recorded a response about either why they believe the catastrophe almost occurred or why it did not occur. 

Subsequently, the participants rated how much blame each president deserved for each of these six near-miss catastrophes. For instance, one of the questions was, “How much blame does President Biden (Trump) deserve for nearly allowing North Korea to launch a nuclear strike against the U.S.?”  

To blame or not to blame 

The researchers found that the group that read the disclaimer about the catastrophes being close to happening was more likely to say that the catastrophes were closer to having occurred—as might be expected.  

In addition, people believed that a counterfactual catastrophe was closer to actually happening when it was under the watch of the president they opposed. As a result, people blamed the fictional catastrophes more on the president they opposed than on the president they supported. And the effect was stronger for the group that received the disclaimer about the “close” catastrophes.  

It’s not rare for people to distort facts when talking politics, explains Roese. “Sometimes it reflects misunderstanding, sometimes deliberate deception. But this research goes further in showing how political loyalties can shape imagined alternatives and the moral conclusions that emerge from those imaginings.” 

The ascription of blame to events that actually never happened is particularly striking, adds Mackin, especially when you consider that, “in principle, they didn’t happen.” 

What about praise?  

The team further investigated the reverse scenario: whether the right framing could make people more likely to praise political leaders for ensuring that a counterfactual catastrophe did not happen under their watch. For example, “How much praise does President Biden (Trump) deserve for a cyberattack on American infrastructure by U.S. enemies that did not happen under the President’s watch?” 

Contrary to what might be expected, the researchers found that participants did not ascribe more praise to the leader they supported than the leader they opposed. 

“This is consistent with prior research showing that praise and blame have their own unique psychological mechanisms,” says Mackin.  

The team believes that further research is necessary to closely examine why blame but not praise was impacted by the interplay between presidential support and the likelihood of counterfactual catastrophes happening. 

Taken together, the results underscore how counterfactual catastrophic thinking could further entrench existing political attitudes and, in turn, fuel political polarization. 

“It seems that a lot of political disagreement may involve not only facts, but also the plausibility of the imagined alternative outcomes of leadership decisions,” Roese says.