IF ONLY ...

On the windowsill of psychologist Lawrence Sanna's office rests a large stone with the words "If only..." carved in it. Since he studies defensive pessimism, optimism, and how people think about the what-might-have-beens and what-could-bes in their lives, it represents the bedrock of his research.

"I'm trying to answer questions about how people cope with various life events more generally," he says. "It was astounding to me how different people's reactions can be to events that seem so similar to an outside observer."

"If only" thinking seems to be a pervasive part of people's lives, explains Sanna, and falls into two categories: before-the-fact and after-the-fact. These two categories in turn are classified as upward or downward, meaning better or worse than reality.

Faced with an impending performance, defensive pessimists engage in upward before-the-fact thinking—they cook up the worst-case scenarios or aggrandize the competition and maintain low expectations of their own performance before the event. "They use this as a motivating force for themselves to help them do very well," he says. "Their pessimism is not realistic compared to their performance. Their past history indicates they're quite successful. They're trying to discount that they're successful to try and make sure they are successful."

But optimists tend to utilize downward after-the-fact thinking—they mentally remind themselves that others performed worse than they did after the event. They don't like to think about the performance beforehand. "They have the capacity to see that their actuality is better than others," Sanna says.

Are the defensive pessimists or the optimists more successful in their styles? According to Sanna, both are equally so. In his studies of exam performances, both groups scored much higher than the class mean. Sanna also studied what happened when the two groups switched strategies.

"They can't use the other group's strategy effectively," he says. "They usually performed very poorly when that happened. You just have to recognize that people approach their situations differently."

—Nella Letizia