Petronella Randell is a postdoctoral research fellow on the What if…? Knowing by Imagining (WIKI) project at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the imagination, transformative experience, and decision theory.
A post by Petronella Randell
Most of us are familiar with catastrophising; either because we do it ourselves, or because someone we know is prone to it. When going through airport security, I often imagine the various ways a smuggler could have concealed something in my bag without my knowing. Is someone with my name on the most wanted list? I wonder what it will be like to be mistakenly interrogated: how will I convince them I’m not Petronella Randell, but Petronella Randell? More prosaically: I don’t remember locking the door to my house. What will happen if the door isn’t locked? It’s easy to imagine all of these things and how awful they will be, typically also neglecting to think about practical steps to take if any of these things actually happen.
The term ‘catastrophising’ was first coined by Ellis (1962) and was subsequently identified as a cognitive distortion by Beck et al. (1979), though what exactly catastrophising amounts to is less clear. Some say it involves believing that the worst will happen (Leung and Wong, 1998; Yurica and DiTomasso, 2005). Others say catastrophising involves magnifying the severity or probability of bad outcomes (Ellis, 1962; Horsham and Chung, 2013). It may reflect an intolerance of risky prospects (Carleton, Norton, & Asmundson, 2007) or be prompted by continuous ‘what-if?’ questioning of oneself (Davey and Levy, 1998; Meeten et al. 2012; Startup and Davey, 2003). Crucially (for us), it involves imagining the worst. It is an imaginative distortion (Roepke and Seligman, 2016; Torem, 2024).
There is a wealth of empirical evidence about our tendency to catastrophise and how this tendency can impact our physical and mental health. In a review, Gellatly and Beck (2016) found catastrophising to be a predictor of or correlated with: “panic, phobia, health anxiety, obsessive–compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, pain, and traumatic brain injury.” This is an incomplete list. However, that catastrophising is observed in so many conditions is testament to its prevalence.
It’s worth noting here that catastrophising sometimes is used as a catch-all term for any instance of imagining the worst, which can present real problems for patients. Stanford University’s recent ‘Rename Pain Catastrophising’ ran a survey of 2,911 participants which found that 32% of participants took ‘catastrophising’ to be a “stigmatising and perjorative” term (Webster et al.,2023).[1]
I won’t deny that catastrophising can be damaging to one’s mental and physical health. My aim is not to take on the psychologists from the armchair. Instead, I aim to argue that imagining the worst doesn’t always involve distorted thinking; it doesn’t always amount to catastrophising.[2] The central question to answer then is: given that catastrophising is near universally regarded as irrational or maladaptive, what makes it (in)appropriate to imaginatively explore the worst possibilities? How and when should we revise our beliefs in light of imagining the worst?
First, note that worst-case scenarios are used in the justification of a number of research programmes. Prior to efforts in the 1990s such as NASA’s Spaceguard survey, few Earth-crossing asteroids (i.e., asteroids that cross the Earth’s orbital path) had been recorded. In stating the importance of such a project, Morrison (1992: v) claimed that an asteroid impact could lead to ‘massive loss of food crops and possible breakdown of society’. Further examples include work on climate change, pandemics, natural disasters, the Manhattan project and many others.
It isn’t just researchers. We imagine the worst to inform everyday decisions, such as the decision to wear a seatbelt or helmet. Imagining or anticipating the worst has been normalised as a motivation for a number of precautionary behaviours. Consider that despite the fact that we are more likely to die on the way to the airport than in a plane crash, pre-flight safety demonstrations must, by law, be performed prior to lift off.
Imagining the worst must be permissible, at least sometimes. We expend significant time, money and effort in preventing or reducing the risk that the worst will happen. Indeed, we might even think people (governments, or corporations) are reckless if they fail to consider worst-case scenarios.
What distinguishes these kinds of cases from those we started with? Plenty of practical considerations will be relevant here: regulations, laws, conditions set out in insurance policies and so on. However, I’m interested in the epistemic profile of imagining the worst. When is imagining the worst permissible, and when does it go wrong? Can it be epistemically valuable? Imagining the worst might fall short of our epistemic ideals at three distinct locations: downstream effects on our epistemic state, the imaginative input, and the way the imagining unfolds from the imaginative input.
Epistemically disvaluable downstream effects are easiest to identify. Imagining the worst may lead us to believe that the worst will happen. If I conclude that someone with my name is on the most wanted list after imagining it, I’ve clearly made a bad inference! This explanation won’t always be applicable—those who imagine the worst don’t always believe that the worst will happen (Haerle, 2023). We are often able to recognise that our concerns are unlikely to materialise.
Additionally, this overlooks the role of the imagination in the formation of beliefs. Philosophers have recently argued that epistemic goods such as belief and justification can be gained from the imagination, as long as our imaginings are suitably constrained (Berto, 2018; Kind and Kung, 2016; Kind, 2016; 2018; 2021; Langland-Hassan, 2016; 2025). This gives us another lead: imagining the worst may be valuable or disvaluable insofar as it meets these constraints.
The most well-known constraints are Kind’s (2016:150-151) change and reality constraints. The reality constraint says that our imaginings should represent the world as we believe it to be. The change constraint says that when we imaginatively alter the world, we ought to do so by following the logical consequences of our interventions. If these conditions are met, we can learn from the imagination.
These constraints are eminently plausible. But, as it stands, imagining the worst will often adhere to the change and reality constraints—worst-case scenarios would not be concerning if they were not at least somewhat plausible or realistic. This doesn’t mean the proposed constraints on the imagination are wrong. Imagining the worst is an atypical use of the imagination; and as Kind (2016: 152) notes, the constraints are not necessary conditions on epistemically valuable imaginings. That said, I strongly suspect that further specification of the change and realty conditions would change this.
Whether an imagining is epistemically valuable depends on not only how an imagining unfolds, but the imaginative input it unfolds from. Which inputs we entertain and the form an imagined scenario takes will depend on the possibilities we take to be salient. Attention, then, may be another important part of the picture.
Munton (2025) emphasises that what we attend to determines whether we gain epistemic goods at all. If I am seeking out information relevant to my paper, I am not served by my attention being drawn to cat videos. While attention may be involuntary, at least sometimes we can direct our attention and cultivate it. For instance, by watching more cat videos, I am able to attend to the distinctive features of different breeds of cat.
If imagining the worst is not relevant to one’s task, it may mean that one is directing one’s attention in a suboptimal way. It fails to adhere to what Munton (2025: 73) calls the ‘norm of relevance’ on attention: optimal salience structures prioritise task-relevant information. Existential risk researchers adhere to this norm—they are aiming to find answers to questions about worst-case scenarios, so they attend to relevant possibilities when they imagine the worst. One who imagines the worst spontaneously, associatively, in response to no external prompting or active inquiry, attends in a non-ideal way. That is not to say that such imaginings never pay off, only that when a worst-case scenario is not relevant to what one ought to be attending to (insofar as one’s attention can be directed), we open ourselves up to criticism for attending to the wrong possibilities.
This criticism can be compounded by repeatedly attending to the same possibility. Sometimes, imagining the worst involves repeatedly imagining a particular worst-case scenario. Norms on inquiry can help us here, particularly, Haerle’s (2023) zetetic requirement. That requirement says that we ought not inquire into propositions we have sufficient evidence to settle. Friedman (2019) argues that we may damage our epistemic standing by inquiring into what we already believe or know. By imagining the worst when we shouldn’t, we may undermine our epistemic standing.
There is undoubtedly much more that philosophers have to say about imagining the worst and the rationality of catastrophising than outlined in this post. I only hope to have made the case that imagining the worst isn’t always irrational, contrary to the assumption that doggedly follows catastrophising.
Notes
[1] See also this post by Gwenn Herman (2020) on the use of ‘catastrophising’ "Catastrophizing": A form of pain shaming - U.S. Pain Foundation.
[2] I suspect some catastrophising may not be irrational either, though I won’t pursue that here.
References
Beck, A. T., Rush, A., Shaw, B., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. New York, NY, USA: Guilford.
Berto, F. (2018). Taming the runabout imagination ticket. Synthese, 1(8): 2029-2043.
Carleton, R. N., Norton, M. P. J., & Asmundson, G. J. (2007). Fearing the unknown: A short version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21(1), 105-117.
Davey and Levy (1998) Internal statements associated with catastrophic worrying. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 26(1), 1998, 21-32
Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and emotion in psychotherapy. Lyle Stuart.
Gellatly, R., & Beck, A. T. (2016). Catastrophic thinking: A transdiagnostic process across psychiatric disorders. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 40(4), 441-452.
Friedman, J. (2019). Checking again. Philosophical Issues, 29, 84-96.
Haerle, P. H. (2023). Is OCD epistemically irrational?. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 30(2), 133-146.
Horsham, S., & Chung, M. C. (2013). Investigation of the relationship between trauma and pain catastrophising: The roles of emotional processing and altered self-capacity. Psychiatry Research, 208(3), 274-284.
Langland-Hassan, P. (2016). On choosing what to imagine. In Kind, A and Kung, P (eds) Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press. 61-84.
Langland-Hassan, P. (2025). Explaining Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Leung, P. W., & Wong, M. M. (1998). Can cognitive distortions differentiate between internalising and externalising problems?. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 39(2), 263-269.
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Kind, A., & Kung, P. (2016). Introduction: The puzzle of imaginative use. In Kind, A and Kung, P (eds) Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press. 1-37
Meeten, F., Dash, S. R., Scarlet, A. L. S., & Davey, G. C. L. (2012). Investigating the effect of intolerance of uncertainty on catastrophic worrying and mood. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 50(11), 690-698.
Morrison, D. (Ed.). (1992). The Spaceguard survey: report of the NASA international near-Earth-object detection workshop (Vol. 107979). NASA.
Munton, J. (2025). Priority and prejudice: The Epistemology of Salience and Attention. Oxford University Press.
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Torem, M. S. (2024). Future focused strategies in treating depression. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 66(2), 108-124.
Webster, F., Connoy, L., Longo, R., Ahuja, D., Amtmann, D., Anderson, A.,… Darnall, B. D. (2023). Patient responses to the term pain catastrophizing: thematic analysis of cross-sectional international data. The Journal of Pain, 24(2), 356-367.
Yurica, C. L., & DiTomasso, R. A. (2005). Cognitive distortions. In Freeman, A., Felgoise, S.H., Nezu, C.M., Nezu, A.M., Reinecke, M.A. (eds), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Springer. 117-122