Skip to main content

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Chapter
  • Print publication year: 2008
  • Online publication date: June 2012

31 - Propensities and Counterfactuals: The Loser That Almost Won

Export citation
Summary

The question of how people think of things that could have happened but did not has attracted increasing interest among psychologists in recent years (J. T. Johnson, 1986; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a; Landman, 1987; D. T. Miller, Turnbull, & MacFarland, 1990; Wells & Gavanski, 1989; Wells, Taylor, & Turtle, 1987). As philosophers have long known, the study of counterfactuals cannot be separated from a conception of causality, and an understanding of causality requires a conception of possibility and conditional probability. Counterfactual assertions rest on causal beliefs, and causal attributions invoke counterfactual beliefs, for example, about what would have happened in the absence of a putative cause. Some counterfactual assertions assign degrees of probability or plausibility to unrealized outcomes, many causal beliefs are probabilistic, and judgments of probability often draw on impressions of causal tendencies or propensities. The present article is concerned with a psychological analysis of this nexus of issues.

Our study began with an attempt to understand the psychology of assertions of the form “X almost happened,” which we call close counterfactuals. An important characteristic of such assertions is that they are not expressed as a conditional with a specified antecedent, as counterfactual conditionals are. The close counterfactual does not invoke an alternative possible world, but states a fact about the history of this world – namely, that things were close to turning out differently than they did.

Recommend this book

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this book to your organisation's collection.

Reasoning
  • Online ISBN: 9780511814273
  • Book DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814273
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×
References
Adams, E. W. (1976). Prior probabilities and counterfactual conditionals. In Harper, W. L. and Hooker, C. A. (Eds.), Foundations of probability theory, statistical inference, and statistical theories of science (Vol. 1, pp. 1–21). Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.
Ajzen, I. (1977). Intuitive theories of events and the effects of base-rate information on prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, 303–314.
Bar-Hillel, M. (1990). Back to base rates. In Hogarth, R. M. (Ed.), Insights in decision making: A tribute to Hillel J. Einhoorn (pp. 200–216). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Black, J. B., and Bower, G. H. (1979). Episodes as chunks in narrative memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 187–198.
Braine, M. D. S. (1978). On the relation between the natural logic of reasoning and standard logic. Psychological Review, 85, 1–21.
Ducasse, C. J. (1969). Causation and the types of necessity. New York: Dover.
Einhorn, H., and Hogarth, R. (1986). Judging probable cause. Psychological Bulletin, 99, 3–19.
Fielding, H. (1975). The History of Tom Jones, a foundling (Vol. 2). Oxford, England: Wesleyan University Press/Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1749.)
Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≉ foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288–299.
Fischhoff, B. (1982). For those condemned to study the past. In Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 422–444). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Freyd, J., and Finke, R. (1984). Representational momentum. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 10, 126–132.
Gigerenzer, G., Hell, W., and Blank, H. (1988). Presentation and content: The use of base rates as a continuous variable. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 513–525.
Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., and Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295–314.
Goodman, N. (1954). Fact, fiction and forecast (1st ed.). London: Athlone Press.
Goodman, N. (1983). Fact, fiction, and forecast (4th ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hart, H. L. A., and Honore, A. M. (1959). Causation in the law. London: Oxford University Press.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
Heider, F., and Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259.
Hofstadter, D. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. New York: Basic Books.
Johnson, J. T. (1986). The knowledge of what might have been: Affective and attributional consequences of near outcomes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 12, 51–62.
Johnson, J. T., Ogawa, K. H., Delforge, A., and Early, D. (1989). Causal primacy and comparative fault: The effect of position in a causal chain on judgments of legal responsibility. Personality and Social Psychology, 15, 161–174.
Johnson, M. K. (1988). Discriminating the origin of information. In Oltmanns, T. F. and Maher, B. A. (Eds.), Delusional beliefs: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 34–65). New York: Wiley.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kahneman, D ., and Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136–153.
Kahnemen, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80, 237–251.
Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1982a). The simulation heuristic. In Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 201–208). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1982b). Variants of uncertainty. Cognition, 11, 143–157.
Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In Levine, D. (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–240). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Keren, G., and Wagenaar, W. A. (1985). On the psychology of playing blackjack: Normative and descriptive considerations with implications for decision theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 114, 133–158.
Kintsch, W., and Dijk, T. A. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85, 363–384.
Kvart, I. (1986). A theory of counterfactuals. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Kvart, I. (1989). Causal independence. Unpublished manuscript.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Landman, J. (1987). Regret and elation following action and inaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13, 524–536.
Lewin, K. (1936). Principles of topological psychology (F. Heider & G. M. Heider, Trans). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lewis, D. (1973). Counterfactuals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, D. (1979). Counterfactual dependence and time's arrow. Noûs, 13, 455–476.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, Volume 2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Mackie, J. L. (1974). The cement of the universe: A study of causation. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press).
Michotte, A. E. (1946). La perception de la causalité [The perception of causality]. Louvain, Belgium: University of Louvain Publications.
Miller, D. T., and Gunasegaram, S. (1990). Temporal order and the perceived mutability of events: Implications for blame assignment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 1111–1118.
Miller, D. T., Turnbull, W., and McFarland, C. (1990). Counterfactual thinking and social perception: Thinking about what might have been. In Zanna, M. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 305–331). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Miller, G. A., and Johnson-Laird, P. L. (1976). Language and perception. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Nute, D. (1980). Topics in conditional logic. Boston: Reidel.
Pennington, N., and Hastie, R. (1988). Explanation-based decision making: Effects of memory structure on judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 14, 521–533.
Pollock, J. L. (1976). Subjunctive reasoning. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.
Read, S. J. (1987). Constructing causal scenarios: A knowledge structure approach to causal reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 288–302.
Rips, L. (1990). Reasoning. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 321–353.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1977). Understanding and summarizing brief stories. In Laberge, D. and Samuels, J. (Eds.), Basic processes in reading, perception and comprehension (pp. 265–303). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schank, R. C. (1975). The structure of episodes in memory. In Bobrow, D. G. and Collins, A. (Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science (pp. 237–272). New York: Academic Press.
Schank, R. C., and Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Shafer, G. (1976). A mathematical theory of evidence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Skyrms, B. (1980). The prior propensity account of subjunctive conditionals. In Harper, W. L., Stalnaker, R., and Pearce, G. (Eds.), Ifs: Conditionals, belief, decision, chance and time (Vol. 1, pp. 125–162). Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1968). A theory of conditionals. In Rescher, N. (Ed.), Studies in logical theory: American Philosophical Quarterly monograph series 2 (pp. 98–112). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Talmy, L. (1981, May). Force images. Paper presented at the Conference on Language and Mental Imagery, University of California, Berkeley.
Talmy, L. (1983). How language structures space. In Pick, H. & Acredolo, L. (Eds.), Spatial orientation: Theory, research, and application (pp. 219–282). New York: Plenum Press.
Trabasso, T., Secco, T., and van den Broek, P. (1984). Causal cohesion and story coherence. In Mandl, H., Stein, N. L., and Trabasso, T. (Eds.), Learning and comprehension of text (pp. 83–111). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tversky, A., and Kahneman, D. (1980). Causal schemas in judgments under uncertainty. In Fishbein, M. (Ed.), Progress in social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 153–160). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tversky, A., and Kahneman, D. (1982). Evidential impact of base rates. In Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A. (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 201–208). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Vendler, Z. (1967). Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wells, G. L., and Gavanski, I. (1989). Mental simulation of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 161–169.
Wells, G. L, Taylor, B. R., and Turtle, J. W. (1987). The undoing of scenarios. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 421–430.
Cancel
Confirm
×