People often talk about the consequences of their negative experiences with others in ways that serve important social functions. But to fully understand this social function, it is vital to understand how listeners appraise the event being shared with them. We hypothesized people might draw on the consequences of others’ events to appraise what those experiences were like at the time. In three pre-registered experiments, we asked subjects to read someone else’s first-person account of a negative event. For some subjects, this account ended in a statement suggesting the event led either to growth or harm. We found that subjects who read that the event led to growth tended to think the event was less negative at the time than subjects who read nothing about consequences. Taken together, our findings suggest that people draw on the consequences of other people’s negative events to make unwarranted appraisals about those events.

人们经常以具有重要社会功能的方式谈论他们与他人的负面经历的后果。但要充分理解这种社会功能，了解听众如何评价与他们分享的事件至关重要。我们假设人们可能会利用他人事件的后果来评估当时的经历。在三个预先注册的实验中，我们要求受试者阅读其他人对负面事件的第一人称叙述。对于某些对象，该描述以声明结尾，暗示该事件要么导致增长，要么导致伤害。我们发现，读到事件导致成长的受试者往往认为该事件在当时比没有读到任何后果的受试者更不消极。综合起来，