Counterfactual Thinking in the History of Psychology Course

History of psychology students wrote essays about historical figures and counterfactual events. A linguistic analysis of the essays revealed that counterfactual assignments included more auxiliary verbs and more references to tentativeness and the future. More important, scores on the counterfactual assignments but not the historical figure assignments correlated positively with a critical thinking subtest of the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency. The linguistic analysis and standardized test results suggest that the counterfactual assignment promotes a different form of thinking than more traditional historical assignments. Counterfactual thinking assignments may be applied to courses in other areas of psychology. Instructors have developed a variety of strategies for encouraging critical thinking in psychology courses (Gray, 1993; Rimiene, 2002). One approach has been to emphasize reasoning skills, including both the ability to formulate and to evaluate arguments in psychology (Anderson & Soden, 2001). This article describes and provides a preliminary assessment of an assignment designed to encourage reasoning skills in the history of psychology courses. A course in the history of psychology provides many opportunities to encourage critical thinking, including correcting historical myths (Olson, Hogan, & Santos, 2005), evaluating historical journal articles (Henderson, 1995), examining the philosophical assumptions underpinning psychology (Cox, 1997), and debating historical issues (Carroll, 2006). However, student knowledge of the history of psychology is very weak at the outset of such courses (Bunnell, 1992; Punches & Viney, 1986; Stedman, 1994; Woody, Viney, & Johns, 2002). Early in the history course, students may simply lack the knowledge base for effective critical thinking. In light of these findings, my approach to encouraging critical thinking in the history of psychology courses was two-fold. First, students developed their knowledge of the factual basis of the history of psychology by completing a historical figure assignment. Second, students developed their reasoning about historical events by completing a counterfactual thinking assignment. The purpose of the historical figure assignment was to increase students’ awareness of the role of a single individual in the evolution of psychology. The assignment (modelled after Simonton, 1994) asked students to choose a person and include biographical information, prominent mentors and students, obstacles encountered, major concepts and theories, and a discussion of the relevant zeitgeist, where appropriate. The assignment was due in the middle of the semester. The historical figure assignment was designed to be accessible to students. I encouraged students to ‘connect’ with their chosen historical figure. Moreover, my hope was that success in this assignment would increase student confidence in their mastery of relevant factual material in the history of psychology, a prerequisite for effective critical thinking. Psychologists have studied counterfactual thinking in relation to emotion (Medvec, Madey, & Gilkovich, 1995), judgment (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998), and stress (El Leithy, Brown, & Robbins, 2006). Medvec et al. examined the emotional reactions of silver and bronze medalists at the 1992 Summer Olympics, and found that bronze medalists tended to be happier than silver medalists.