Counterfactual thinking

Counterfactual thinking is a term of psychology that describes the tendency people have to imagine alternatives to reality. Humans are predisposed to think about how things could have turned out differently if only..., and also to imagine what if?.

Overview

A person may imagine how an outcome could have turned out differently, and they can reflect on how the antecedents that led to the event might have been different. For example, a person may reflect upon how a car accident could have turned out, and they can reflect on how some of the antecedents might have been different e.g., if only I hadn't been speeding... or the same even if I had been going slower.... People can imagine alternatives that are better or worse than reality, e.g., if only I hadn't been speeding, my car wouldn't have been wrecked or if I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt I would have been killed (Roese & Olson, 1995). People can contemplate the consequences of the alternative outcome. Their counterfactual thoughts can affect their emotions, such as regret, guilt, relief, or satisfaction; their social ascriptions such as blame and responsibility, and their causal judgments (Markman, Klein, & Suhr, 2009).

Counterfactual thinking is marked during the period immediately after a negotiation has ended. In this context, the participants are more likely to dwell on alternative outcomes which were plausibly missed rather than thinking about the unwanted consequences which were effectively avoided.^[1]

In fact, one of the most significant areas where counterfactuals arose was in social or political philosophy. Most treatments of society had to be limited to a strictly "logical" analysis, else they would be condemned to being viewed as "idealistic" or "unrealistic", certainly not "scientific". If one were to talk about how society might be different (for example, not based upon slavery), one was viewed as being hopelessly unscientific or even "romantic". How then to discuss a society not yet existent (a society without slavery, to continue the example)? Counterfactual reasoning provided such a way to escape the limits of a strictly "logical" analysis, yet not be idealistic. However, can counterfactual reasoning be viewed as "logical" (or scientific)?

The well known philosopher Nicholas Rescher (as well as others) has written about the interrelationship between counterfactual reasoning and Modal logic. ^[2] The relationship between counterfactual reasoning based upon Modal logics may also be exploited in literature or Victorian Studies, painting and poetry. ^{[3] [4] [5] [6]}

History

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1982) pioneered the study of counterfactual thought, showing that people tend to think 'if only' more often about exceptional events than about normal events. Many related tendencies have since been examined, e.g., whether the event is an action or inaction, whether it is controllable, its place in the temporal order of events, or its causal relation to other events (Mandel, Hilton, & Catellani, 2005).

Theories of Counterfactual Thinking

Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller (1986) proposed that the cognitive processes that give rise to counterfactual thoughts include memory retrieval processes by which exceptional events recruit their normal counterparts. Ruth M.J. Byrne (2005) proposed that the mental representations and cognitive processes that underlie the imagination of alternatives to reality are similar to those that underlie rational thought, including reasoning from counterfactual conditionals.

In Popular Culture

In the fourth series of the CBS comedy series The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler develop a game called 'Counterfactuals' which is based on changing one accepted state of the universe and postulating the answer to a question based on such a change. For example: "In a world where Rhinoceroses are domesticated pets, who wins the Second World War?"

Notes

1. ^ Moffit, Michael L. et al. The Handbook of Dispute Resolution, p. 227. at Google Books citing Charles E. Naquin et al. "The agony of opportunity in negotiation: Number of negotiable issues, counterfactual thinking, and feelings of satisfaction," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 91, Issue 1, May 2003, pp 97-107; "Are Your Talks too Complex?" Harvard Program on Negotiation.
2. ^ "Hypothetical Reasoning", by Nicholas Rescher, North Holland Pub. Co., 1964, especially Chapter 7.
3. ^ "Possible Worlds of Fiction and History", by Dolezel, Lubomír, New Literary History, 1998, 29(4): 785-809
4. ^ "Lives Unled in Realist Fiction", by Miller, Andrew H., Representations 98, Spring 2007, The Regents of the University of California, ISSN 1553-855X, pp. 118-134.
5. ^ "Not Forthcoming", by Miller, Andrew H., Dickens Universe, 2009, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
6. ^ http://www.estherlederberg.com/EImages/Extracurricular/Dickens%20Universe/Counter%20Factuals.html

References

• Byrne, R.M.J. (2005). The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality. MA, Cambridge: MIT press.
• Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93(2), 136-153.
• Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In Kahneman, D. P. Slovic, and Tversky, A. (Eds.). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. pp. 201-208. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Markman, K., Klein, W. & Suhr, E. (2009). Handbook of mental simulation and human imagination. Hove, Psychology Press.
• Moffit, Michael L. and Robert C. Bordone. (2005). The Handbook of Dispute Resolution. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 10-ISBN 0787975389/13-ISBN 9780787975388; OCLC 183926885
• Roese, N.J. & Olson, J.M. (1995). What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking. New Jersey: Erlbaum.