Gabriele Oettingen

Who they are

Gabriele Oettingen is a psychologist at New York University who was previously at the University of Hamburg. She is the originator of fantasy realisation theory and of mental contrasting, and her work supplies the one experimental literature aimed directly at the central practice of the positive-thinking tradition. It points the other way.

The distinction her work rests on is easy to lose when her name is cited. She separates expectations, which are judgements of likelihood grounded in past performance, from fantasies, which are free imagery of the accomplished future. Expectations predict higher effort and better performance. Fantasies do not, and in her studies they predicted the reverse. Picturing the wanted outcome as already attained is a fantasy in her terms.

She did not find that imagining the future is bad. She found that two things that look alike from the outside, expecting to succeed and picturing oneself having succeeded, have opposite effects, and she then built the practice that works out of the one the genre discards.

Key papers

Expectations versus fantasies (2002)

Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). "The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1198-1212.

Four studies, with outcomes measured from weeks to about two years after the thinking was assessed. Graduating students at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, 83 men of whom 40 were reached two years later, were followed for job offers, salary and applications. Positive expectations predicted more offers and higher salary, and positive fantasies predicted fewer offers, lower salary and fewer applications. In a second study, 83 American students with a crush were followed for about five months, and positive fantasies predicted a lower likelihood of starting a relationship. In a third, 117 undergraduates were assessed two days before a midterm, and positive fantasies predicted less effort and less grade improvement over six weeks. In a fourth, 51 patients admitted for a first hip replacement were rated by physiotherapists two weeks after surgery, and positive fantasies predicted poorer recovery on all three measures. The studies were correlational.

Positive fantasies sap energy (2011)

Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). "Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719-729. The first author is Heather Kappes. In four experiments, induced positive fantasies lowered energy. In the first, the measure was systolic blood pressure, which fell by about three millimetres of mercury.

The 2021 meta-analysis

Wang, G., Wang, Y., & Gai, X. (2021). A meta-analysis of mental contrasting with implementation intentions, covering 21 studies and about 15,900 participants, reported an average effect of 0.34 on goal attainment. It is by other authors, and it is the main evidence for her remedy.

Key ideas

Expectations and fantasies

An expectation is a judgement of likelihood. A fantasy is imagery. The first predicts effort and the second can predict its absence.

Mental contrasting

The remedy is to picture the wanted future and then the obstacle in present reality, and to attach an if-then plan to the obstacle, borrowing from Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intentions. The popular form is WOOP: wish, outcome, obstacle, plan.

The limits

The 2002 studies were correlational. The energy effects are short-term laboratory effects on a proxy measure, and the blood-pressure change is small in absolute terms. The 2021 authors note that publication bias may make the true effect smaller, and the meta-analysis covers the full protocol, so it supports contrasting plus planning as a package and not the contrasting step alone. A claim that positive fantasies produce long-term increases in depressive symptoms, attributed to her group in 2016, could not be verified from a primary source and is not carried.

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