It was a loud, sudden smack, right in front of my face. I instinctively braked and swerved to the left onto the grass of the median strip separating the north and southbound lanes of Interstate 71 in Ohio. My eyes hurt and wanted to stay shut, but I forced them open enough to find my phone and dial 911.
It was dark—about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 21, 2018. I was driving home after a few days in Cincinnati, heading north on I-71, and I was about 15 miles south of Columbus. I was in the left lane, driving on cruise control at the speed limit. I’m a boring driver.
With absolutely no warning, I found myself face to face with this:
Somehow, I had the presence of mind to take a few photos. I think I did so both for potential future insurance purposes and simply because it was so unbelievably unusual.
For several weeks afterward, I wasn’t sure the nature of the object that unexpectedly smashed through my windshield. What was that thing? I showed these photos to some of my graduate students, and one of them identified it.
It’s a mud-flap bracket from a tractor trailer. And if its angle of entry into my car would have been slightly different, it would have hit me right in the face.
Instead, it hit me in the arm, leaving a peculiar wound shaped like a little trident or crow’s foot. That and slight abrasions to my corneas from bits of windshield glass spraying my eyes were my only injuries.
In retrospect, I suspect that it took so long for the doctor or nurse who helped me out to arrive and complete the process of flushing the glass out of my eyes because this was a novel situation for her. She proceeded with caution and kept stepping out of the room in between looking at my eyes and between each small step she took to assist. My guess is that she was consulting with the on-call ophthalmologist. All things considered, she really did a great job. In less than one week, I was totally fine.
Wild story. What’s the point?
Accidents, near misses, and other unusual events can trigger counterfactual thinking. They can cause us—sometimes seemingly unavoidably so—to think about what could or might have happened, various scenarios in which the outcome might have been different than it was, for better or for worse.
In this situation, had the angle of the mud-flap bracket been a bit more parallel to the ground as it broke through the glass, it could have hit me in the neck or head instead of my arm. My injuries in that scenario would almost certainly have been much worse than they were; perhaps even fatally so. In my mind, this was the prevailing thought I had afterward: how the incident could have been worse. This is called downward counterfactual thinking.
Of course, one can also have counterfactual thoughts about how an incident might have turned out better than it did. This is called upward counterfactual thinking. If I would have been in a different place on the road at a different time, or maybe if I had just been in the right lane instead of the left, I might have not hit the mud-flap bracket at all, or maybe it would have struck my car in a different place. (Oddly, there was no indication that the bracket hit my car anywhere other than the windshield—suggesting that it must have been airborne already at the point of first impact.)
We can also engage in counterfactual thinking that is additive in nature, when something didn’t happen but could have happened. For example, the mud-flap bracket could have hit me in the head, but it didn’t. When I reflect upon this incident, therefore, my primary counterfactual thinking was both downward and additive. When we think about something that did happen but might not have happened, that’s subtractive counterfactual thinking. For example, I could consider the incident one in which the mud-flap bracket struck my windshield but it clearly might not have happened for myriad reasons.
Finally, we can engage in self-focused or other-focused counterfactual thinking. If only I had been driving at a different time of day could be an example of self-focused counterfactual thinking whereas if only someone had properly affixed the mud-flap bracket to the truck trailer is other-focused counterfactual thinking. In addition to being downward and additive, for some reason, my primary counterfactual thinking in this incident was other-focused.
That’s a lot of thinking about thinking.
But can counterfactual thinking help us?
There’s quite a pile of research on counterfactual thinking, and it’s not easy even for trained social scientists to make sense of it—mainly because there are so many variables and “it depends” contingencies involved. Practically speaking, though, there are a number of items that we seem to know about counterfactual thinking.
It’s a fairly common phenomenon. We all seem to do it, and that in and of itself suggests to me that it matters in some way.
As noted above, we can engage in it from a variety of angles. So it seems that we have choices about how we can think about possibilities that didn’t materialize.
The way in which we engage in it can influence our subsequent emotions and behaviors. For example, we may feel regret or relief following some incident—and those feelings influence how we behave.
Researchers continue to wrestle with the conditions that make counterfactual thinking more or less useful. My reading of the research suggests that thinking carefully about what could have happened does indeed matter for how we navigate life and learn, particularly regarding unusual and potentially adverse situations.
Specifically, there appears to be value in guiding our counterfactual thinking a bit more intentionally. When something triggers us to think about what might have happened differently (good or bad), we can consider questions like the following:
What was the cause of the situation? In my strange story, it seems like a random occurrence potentially caused by a mechanical or maintenance failure that resulted in the mud-flap flying through the air and hitting my windshield.
Was the cause something I could influence in the future? In my mud-flap bracket incident, there’s nothing in my mind that I can plausibly consider as an intentional action that I could have done differently to avoid the collision. There was zero time to swerve, I was alert, and I was driving carefully. But here’s another example: I recently injured myself while lifting weights. Based upon what happened, it seems to me like I could have avoided the injury through a bit more concentration on what I was doing at the moment, so I’m motivated to do exactly that in the future.
How might the incident affect my behavioral intentions and my application of a lesson to other situations? In my mud-flap bracket collision, the randomness of the situation was indeed a lesson itself. Sometimes—perhaps many times—things happen to us that are beyond our control and beyond our ability to predict. Given that this incident could have been much worse, it made me think about the importance of always being ready for the possibility of death. As morbid as that seems, it drove me to rethink a number of priorities, personally and professionally. I then actually did make real changes in those domains.
What might this mean for dealing with adversity in general?
First, life’s unpredictable challenges and suffering seem to almost always prompt us to ask the questions Why? Or why me? That’s normal. Sometimes the answers to those questions are clear and point to a direct behavioral implication: You fail a test for which you didn’t prepare, so you should take studying seriously in the future to increase your probability of passing. Sometimes the answers to those questions are elusive or downright unknowable. In those cases, it seems that the best path forward is to avoid ruminating and trying to find a cause and instead focus clearly on how whatever happened can guide your future actions. It seems to me that randomness is real, yet we do retain the ability to choose our reactions to the randomness around us. This is where one’s ethical code and values become increasingly important.
Second, as we grapple with adversity—from life-altering tragedies to simple mistakes that we regret—we have choices about how we engage in “what might have happened differently” thinking. In some cases, it’s helpful to consider what you realistically could have done differently to avoid a negative outcome. The key here is realistically. We have to be careful and kind to ourselves. Sometimes we are to blame for what happened, but sometimes we are most certainly not.
Third, from my experience coupled with relevant social science, it appears that every time something happens to us that either could have been much worse or when something happens that actually is unimaginably difficult, we can use those moments as times to clarify our priorities, our values, our purpose, and our relationships with other people. And when we do that, we can then use that clarified vision to shift our behavior, bringing our actions into alignment with how we want to be in this world.
My family thinks it’s a bit weird, but I asked the body shop that repaired my windshield to keep the mud-flap bracket for me to have. It’s in my home office, serving as a reminder of how life can be random, how our existence is a gift, and how there’s tremendous value in bringing a purposeful intentionality to each moment of our day.
References and for further reading
Dillon, Robin L., and Catherine H. Tinsley. "How near-misses influence decision making under risk: A missed opportunity for learning." Management Science 54, no. 8 (2008): 1425-1440. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.1080.0869
Roese, Neal J. "Counterfactual thinking." Psychological Bulletin 121, no. 1 (1997): 133-148. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-02112-007
Smallman, Rachel, and Amy Summerville. "Counterfactual thought in reasoning and performance." Social and Personality Psychology Compass 12, no. 4 (2018): e12376. https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/spc3.12376
Your near-death experience reminds me of the Latin expression and Knights of Columbus motto, "Tempest Fugit. Momento Mori." (Time Flies. Remember Death.) Simply put, we must live every day as though it were our last on earth, because one day, we'll be correct.
Also, this story about 3 Monks and the Devil that was recently just shared in my Parish "That Man Is You" group is really a tale of counterfactual thinking: https://reknewyourfaith.wordpress.com/2021/08/31/three-monks-and-the-devil/