Counterfactual thinking about controllable events

It's not what you did, it's what you could have done

We are more likely to judge agents as morally culpable after we learn they acted freely rather than under duress or coercion. Interestingly, the reverse is also true: Individuals are more likely to be judged to have acted freely after we learn that they committed a moral violation. Researchers have argued that morality affects judgments of force by making the alternative actions the agent could have done instead appear comparatively normal, which then increases the perceived availability of relevant alternative actions. Across five studies, we test the novel predictions of this account. We find that the degree to which participants view possible alternative actions as normal strongly predicts their perceptions that an agent acted freely. This pattern holds both for perceptions of the prescriptive normality of the alternatives (whether the actions are good) and descriptive normality of the alternatives (whether the actions are unusual). We also find that manipulating the prudential value of alternative actions or the degree to which alternatives adhere to social norms, has a similar effect to manipulating whether the actions or their alternatives violate moral norms. This pattern persists even when what is actually done is held constant, and these effects are explained by changes in the perceived normality of the alternatives. Together, these results suggest that across contexts, participants' force judgments depend not on the morality of the actual action taken, but on the normality of possible alternatives. More broadly, our results build on prior work that suggests a unifying role of normality and counterfactuals across many areas of high-level human cognition.

Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change

How do people come to consider a morally unacceptable action, such as “a passenger in an airplane does not want to sit next to a Muslim passenger and so he tells the stewardess the passenger must be moved to another seat”, to be less unacceptable? We propose they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives about how things could have been different that transform the unacceptable action to be less unacceptable. Five experiments identify the cognitive processes underlying this imaginative moral shift: an action is judged less unacceptable when people imagine circumstances in which it would have been moral. The effect occurs for immediate counterfactuals and reflective ones, but is greater when participants create an immediate counterfactual first, and diminished when they create a reflective one first. The effect also occurs for unreasonable actions. We discuss the implications for alternative theories of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying moral judgments.

Increased and biased deliberation in social anxiety

A goal of computational psychiatry is to ground symptoms in basic mechanisms. Theory suggests that avoidance in anxiety disorders may reflect dysregulated mental simulation, a process for evaluating candidate actions. If so, these covert processes should have observable consequences: choices reflecting increased and biased deliberation. In two online general population samples, we examined how self-report symptoms of social anxiety disorder predict choices in a socially framed reinforcement learning task, the patent race, in which the pattern of choices reflects the content of deliberation. Using a computational model to assess learning strategy, we found that self-report social anxiety was indeed associated with increased deliberative evaluation. This effect was stronger for a particular subset of feedback ('upward counterfactual') in one of the experiments, broadly matching the biased content of rumination in social anxiety disorder, and robust to controlling for other psychiatric symptoms. These results suggest a grounding of symptoms of social anxiety disorder in more basic neuro-computational mechanisms.

Counterfactual thinking and recency effects in causal judgment

People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N = 5507), we find evidence for the recency effect and the primacy effect for causal judgment. Traditionally, these effects have been a problem for counterfactual views of causal judgment. However, we argue that an extension of a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment explains both the recency and the primacy effect. In line with the predictions of our extended counterfactual model, we also find that, regardless of causal structure, people tend to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event rather than to the earlier one. Moreover, manipulating this tendency affects causal judgments in the ways predicted by this extended model: asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the earlier event weakens the interaction between recency and causal structure, and asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event strengthens the interaction between recency and causal structure. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking, causal modeling, and late-preemption.

Impact of past behaviour normality: meta-analysis of exceptionality effect

Exceptionality effect is the phenomenon that people associate stronger negative affect with a negative outcome when it is a result of an exception (abnormal behaviour) compared to when it is a result of routine (normal behaviour). In this pre-registered meta-analysis, we examined exceptionality effect in 48 studies (N = 4212). An analysis of 35 experimental studies (n = 3332) showed medium to strong effect (g = 0.60, 95% confidence intervals (CI) [0.41, 0.79]) for past behaviour across several measures (regret/affect: g = 0.66, counterfactual thought: g = 0.39, self-blame: g = 0.44, victim compensation: g = 0.39, offender punishment: g = 0.51). An analysis of 13 one-sample studies presenting a comparison of exceptional and routine behaviours simultaneously (n = 1217) revealed a very strong exceptionality effect (converted g = 1.98, CI [1.57, 2.38]). We tested several theoretical moderators: norm strength, event controllability, outcome rarity, action versus inaction, and status quo. We found that exceptionality effect was stronger when the routine was aligned with the status quo option and with action rather than for inaction. All materials are available on: https://osf.io/542c7/.

Counterfactual Thinking: From Logic to Morality

People create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they imagine how things would have turned out differently “if only. . . .” They understand counterfactuals by constructing models that correspond to the conjecture, and to the presupposed facts. The dual meaning of counterfactuals leads people to make more inferences from them compared to ordinary conditionals. People create counterfactuals by changing an aspect of reality that has been represented explicitly in their models, and they zoom in on a “fault line,” such as an exceptional event. However, knowledge can modulate what is represented in models and so the fault lines can shift. Counterfactuals permeate much of mental life, including judgments about morality, such as blame or praise, and assessments of emotions, such as regret or relief.

Moral judgments of risky choices: A moral echoing effect

Two experiments examined moral judgments about a decision-maker’s choices when he chose a sure-thing, 400 out of 600 people will be saved, or a risk, a two-thirds probability to save everyone and a one-thirds probability to save no-one. The results establish a moral echoing effect — a tendency to credit a decision-maker with a good outcome when the decision-maker made the typical choices of the sure-thing in a gain frame or the risk in a loss frame, and to discredit the decision-maker when there is a bad outcome and the decision-maker made the atypical choices of a risk in a gain frame or a sure-thing in a loss frame. The moral echoing effect is established in Experiment 1 (n=207) in which participants supposed the outcome would turn well or badly, and it is replicated in Experiment 2 (n=173) in which they knew it had turned out well or badly, for judgments of moral responsibility and blame or praise. The effect does not occur for judgments of cause, control, counterfactual alternatives, or emotions.

Heterosexist Ambivalence and Heterocentric Norms: Drinking in Intergroup Discomfort

Eighty two participants read about either a gay male target who felt discomfort in a straight bar or a straight male target who felt discomfort in a gay bar. Participants explained the discomfort, rated the target’s actions, and produced counterfactuals that ‘undid’ his discomfort. Explanations of the targets’ discomfort focused on gayness more than on straightness, suggesting that they were affected by heterocentric norms. The straight target’s expressions of discomfort were perceived as more appropriate than the gay target’s, particularly among participants with strong anti-gay attitudes. Counterfactuals which undid these events also suggested implicit inequities in the perceived norms for interactions between gay and straight persons. These results are explained in terms of ambivalence between support for egalitarianism and anti-gay affect and the continued operation of heterocentric norms that limit the degree to which egalitarianism translates into equal treatment of persons of all sexual orientations.

Styles of Counterfactual Thoughts in People with and without Signs of Depression

People in a depressive state frequently believe that things could have happened differently in their lives, which is regarded as counterfactual thought. This study aimed to investigate whether the styles of counterfactual thought shown by people with indicating signs of depression and by people without any of those signs are different. Study participants were 42 adults divided into two groups: those with signs of depression and those without signs of depression. Five stories taken from newspapers and magazines and fictional scenarios were presented to the participants. After reading such stories, participants had to answer questions about how the narrated facts could have been different from what they actually were. Results indicated similar counterfactual thought styles in both groups (with and without depression signs). Most of the thoughts found were categorized as upward, subtractive, self-referent and that modified an aspect referred to action/inaction. A few significant differences between groups were observed, and most of them were obtained through directed modifications, in the last three stories. Some tendencies were shown in the group of people with signs of depression, such as those found for the subtractive category, t(40) = 2.33, p < .05, which can indicate a trend of possible failure in the preparatory function of CT, and in the hetero-referral function, t(40) = 1.97, p < .05, indicating a difficulty in thinking of different forms of action in the future. The removal of negative events may indicate that these experiences are not beneficial to people's survival. These results may indicate some tendencies about how people in depressive states think about past events.

Cognitive neuroscience of human counterfactual reasoning

Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of human thought, enabling the capacity to shift from perceiving the immediate environment to an alternative, imagined perspective. Mental representations of counterfactual possibilities (e.g., imagined past events or future outcomes not yet at hand) provide the basis for learning from past experience, enable planning and prediction, support creativity and insight, and give rise to emotions and social attributions (e.g., regret and blame). Yet remarkably little is known about the psychological and neural foundations of counterfactual reasoning. In this review, we survey recent findings from psychology and neuroscience indicating that counterfactual thought depends on an integrative network of systems for affective processing, mental simulation, and cognitive control. We review evidence to elucidate how these mechanisms are systematically altered through psychiatric illness and neurological disease. We propose that counterfactual thinking depends on the coordination of multiple information processing systems that together enable adaptive behavior and goal-directed decision making and make recommendations for the study of counterfactual inference in health, aging, and disease.

"If only" counterfactual thoughts about exceptional actions

People create counterfactual alternatives that change an exceptional action to be like a usual one (e.g., "if he had placed his usual small bet he would have lost less"), as shown in Experiment 1. Experiments 2 and 3 eliminated and reversed this well-known effect: An exceptional action is instead changed to an exceptional alternative when it leads to a better outcome. Experiments 4 and 5 show that the reversal occurs whether or not the exceptional alternative is a justified action. The results indicate that the tendency to change an exceptional action to be like a usual one is guided by the optimality of the counterfactual outcome more than the exceptionality or justifiability of the action. The implications for theories of the counterfactual imagination are discussed.

Person as scientist, person as moralist

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.

The person as moralist account and its alternatives

The commentators offer helpful suggestions at three levels: (1) explanations for the particular effects discussed in the target article; (2) implications of those effects for our understanding of the role of moral judgment in human cognition; and (3) more theoretical questions about the overall relationship between ordinary cognition and systematic science. The present response takes up these three issues in turn.

Précis of The rational imagination: how people create alternatives to reality

The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. People often imagine how events might have turned out "if only" something had been different. The "fault lines" of reality, those aspects more readily changed, indicate that counterfactual thoughts are guided by the same principles as rational thoughts. In the past, rationality and imagination have been viewed as opposites. But research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed. In The Rational Imagination, I argue that imaginative thought is more rational than scientists have imagined. People exhibit remarkable similarities in the sorts of things they change in their mental representation of reality when they imagine how the facts could have turned out differently. For example, they tend to imagine alternatives to actions rather than inactions, events within their control rather than those beyond their control, and socially unacceptable events rather than acceptable ones. Their thoughts about how an event might have turned out differently lead them to judge that a strong causal relation exists between an antecedent event and the outcome, and their thoughts about how an event might have turned out the same lead them to judge that a weaker causal relation exists. In a simple temporal sequence, people tend to imagine alternatives to the most recent event. The central claim in the book is that counterfactual thoughts are organised along the same principles as rational thought. The idea that the counterfactual imagination is rational depends on three steps: (1) humans are capable of rational thought; (2) they make inferences by thinking about possibilities; and (3) their counterfactual thoughts rely on thinking about possibilities, just as rational thoughts do. The sorts of possibilities that people envisage explain the mutability of certain aspects of mental representations and the immutability of other aspects.

Postdecisional counterfactual thinking by actors and readers

How do individuals think counterfactually about the outcomes of their decisions? Most previous studies have investigated how readers think about fictional stories, rather than how actors think about events they have actually experienced. We assumed that differences in individuals' roles (actor vs. reader) can make different information available, which in turn can affect counterfactual thinking. Hence, we predicted an effect of role on postdecisional counterfactual thinking. Reporting the results of eight studies, we show that readers undo the negative outcome of a story by undoing the protagonist's choice to tackle a given problem, rather than the protagonist's unsuccessful attempt to solve it. But actors who make the same choice and experience the same negative outcome as the protagonist undo this outcome by altering features of the problem. We also show that this effect does not depend on motivational factors. These results contradict current accounts of counterfactual thinking and demonstrate the necessity of investigating the counterfactual thoughts of individuals in varied roles.

Comparisons, mental models, and the action effect in judgments of regret

People tend to attribute more regret to a character who has decided to take action and experienced a negative outcome than to one who has decided not to act and experienced a negative outcome. For some decisions, however, this finding is not observed in a between-participants design and thus appears to rely on comparisons between people's representations of action and their representations of inaction. In this article, we outline a mental models account that explains findings from studies that have used within- and between-participants designs, and we suggest that, for decisions with uncertain counterfactual outcomes, information about the consequences of a decision to act causes people to flesh out their representation of the counterfactual states of affairs for inaction. In three experiments, we confirm our predictions about participants' fleshing out of representations, demonstrating that an action effect occurs only when information about the consequences of action is available to participants as they rate the nonactor and when this information about action is informative with respect to judgments about inaction. It is important to note that the action effect always occurs when the decision scenario specifies certain counterfactual outcomes. These results suggest that people sometimes base their attributions of regret on comparisons among different sets of mental models.

Counterfactual thinking: the temporal order effect

People often think about how things might have happened differently. Their counterfactual thoughts tend to mentally undo the most recent event in an independent sequence. Consider a game in which two players must each pick the same color card, both red or both black. The first picks black and the second picks red and so they lose. People think, "If only the second player had picked black." Our study tested the idea that the ways in which the players could have won provide counterfactual alternatives to the facts. In three experiments, the same set of facts (both players picked black cards), and the same winning conditions (to win in this new game they must pick different color cards) were presented, but the description of the winning conditions varied (e.g., "if one or the other but not both picks a red card" vs. "if one or the other but not both picks a black card"). The results showed that the temporal order effect can be produced or reversed by different descriptions. The descriptions make accessible different elements of the winning possibilities. A theory of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying counterfactual thinking in the temporal order effect is described.

Judgment dissociation theory: An analysis of differences in causal, counterfactual and covariational reasoning

Research suggests that causal judgment is influenced primarily by counterfactual or covariational reasoning. In contrast, the author of this article develops judgment dissociation theory (JDT), which predicts that these types of reasoning differ in function and can lead to divergent judgments. The actuality principle proposes that causal selections focus on antecedents that are sufficient to generate the actual outcome. The substitution principle proposes that ad hoc categorization plays a key role in counterfactual and covariational reasoning such that counterfactual selections focus on antecedents that would have been sufficient to prevent the outcome or something like it and covariational selections focus on antecedents that yield the largest increase in the probability of the outcome or something like it. The findings of 4 experiments support JDT but not the competing counterfactual and covariational accounts.

"Blaming the victim" under memory load

When presented with negative outcomes, people often engage in counterfactual thinking imagining various ways that events might have been different. This appears to be a spontaneous behavior, with considerable adaptive value. Nevertheless, counterfactual thinking may also engender systematic biases in various judgment tasks, such as allocating blame for a mishap, or deciding on the appropriate compensation to a victim. Thus, counterfactuals sometimes require thought suppression or discounting, potentially resource-demanding tasks. In this study. participants made mock-jury decisions about control and counterfactual versions of simple stories. The judgments of two groups of participants, differing in their respective levels of working memory capacity, were compared. In addition, all participants held memory loads during various stages of the primary task. Lower-span individuals were especially susceptible to bias associated with the counterfactual manipulation, but only when holding memory loads during judgment. The results suggest that counterfactual thoughts arise automatically, and may later require effortful, capacity-demanding suppression.

Temporal and causal order effects in thinking about what might have been

When people think counterfactually about what might have been different for a sequence of events, they are influenced by the order in which the events occurred. They tend to mentally undo the most recent event in a temporal sequence of two events. But they tend to mentally undo the first event in a causal sequence of four events. We report the results of two experiments that show that the temporal and causal order effects are not dependent on the number of events in the sequence. Our first experiment, with 300 participants, shows that the temporal order effect occurs for sequences with four events as well as for sequences with two events. Our second experiment, with 372 participants, shows that the causal order effect occurs for sequences with two events as well as for sequences with four events. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations that people construct of temporal and causal sequences.

Mental models and counterfactual thoughts about what might have been

Counterfactual thoughts about what might have been ('if only em leader ') are pervasive in everyday life. They are related to causal thoughts, they help people learn from experience and they influence diverse cognitive activities, from creativity to probability judgements. They give rise to emotions and social ascriptions such as guilt, regret and blame. People show remarkable regularities in the aspects of the past they mentally 'undo' in their counterfactual thoughts. These regularities provide clues about their mental representations and cognitive processes, such as keeping in mind true possibilities, and situations that are false but temporarily supposed to be true.