Thinking about Russia: plausible pasts and probable futures

This paper uses both correlational and experimental methods to explore the power of counterfactual cognitions about the past to constrain judgments about the future as well as policy preferences. Study 1 asked 47 specialists on the Soviet Union to assess both the plausibility of controversial counterfactuals and the probability of controversial conditional forecasts. The results reveal deep ideological schisms, with liberals much more likely than conservatives to believe that Stalinism was not inevitable, that the Cold War could have ended earlier, and that Gorbachev might have succeeded in democratizing the Soviet Union if he had been a better tactician, among others. Reactions to these counterfactuals proved to be highly predictive of positions that experts in early 1992 endorsed concerning the advisability of 'shock therapy', expanding NATO eastward, and economic aid to Russia. Study 2 manipulated the salience and plausibility of counterfactual scenarios concerning (a) why the Cold War ended as it did, and (b) how close the US and USSR came to nuclear war. Changes in the counterfactual scenarios that non-experts endorsed produced significant changes in their policy preferences in the direction suggested by the salient counterfactual. Experts, however, were unswayed, often generating counter-arguments against dissonant counterfactuals. Taken together, the studies show that assumptions about what happened in the missing control conditions of history are highly subjective, largely theory-driven and profoundly consequential.