Cognitive Processes in Counterfactual Thinking about what Might Have Been

By Ruth M. J. Byrne. 1997

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Explanation in Human-AI Systems: A Literature Meta-Review, Synopsis of Key Ideas and Publications, and Bibliography for Explainable AI (2019, background): “Additional relevant research includes: Byrne (1997; 2017); Byrne and McEleney (2000); Kahneman and Varey (1990); Halpern and Pearl (2005a,b), Hilton, McClure and Slugoski (2005); Hitchcock (2003); Hitchcock and Woodward (2003); Hoffman, et al., (2014); Khemlani and Johnson-Laird (2010); Kim,…”
Spontaneous counterfactual thoughts and causal explanations (2006, background): “It has been implicated in a range of important psychological processes, including reasoning (e.g., Byrne, 1997, 2005), creativity (e.g., Hofstadter, 1985), social judgements (e.g., Macrae & Milne, 1992), emotions such as guilt and regret (e.g., Byrne &McEleney, 2000), and reactions to traumatic…”
Anomalies in real and counterfactual worlds : An eye-movement investigation (2008, background): “, Byrne, 2002), and on what sort of constraints there are on the kinds of counterfactual thoughts people are likely to generate in a variety of circumstances (e.g., Byrne, 1997; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Markman & Tetlock, 2000). Counterfactuals are ubiquitous in cognitive activities, ranging from si”
Effect of Counterfactual and Factual Thinking on Causal Judgments (2003, background): “…counterfactual representations are more fleshed out than factual representations because, whereas mental models of factual events constitute default representations, as Byrne (1997) stated, “counterfactual scenarios need to be recoverable from the factual scenario on which they are based” (p. 107).”
Counterfactual thinking: The temporal order effect (2004, background): “The sorts of counterfactuals that are useful to people may also be useful to learning algorithms in artificial intelligence systems (Costello & McCarthy, 1999).”
A Survey of Contrastive and Counterfactual Explanation Generation Methods for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (2021, background): “The process of ‘‘thinking about past possibilities and past or present impossibilities’’ is therefore called counterfactual thinking [23].”
Conditionals: a theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference. (2002, background): “The ability to envisage counterfactual possibilities is an important part of how one evaluates what actually happens (Byrne, 1997; Byrne & McEleney, 2000; Byrne, Segura, Culhane, Tasso, & Berrocal, 2000; Kahneman & Miller, 1986).”
Coming to grips with the past: Effect of repeated simulation on the perceived plausibility of episodic counterfactual thoughts (2013, unknown): “One possibility, derived from the mental models view on counterfactual generation (Byrne, 1997; Byrne, 2002; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002), is that when people generate episodic counterfactual thoughts they contrast a mental representation of what is “true” or what is the “norm”—which in the case of…”
Counterfactual thinking about actions and failures to act. (2000, background): “Inactions can be represented more economically by a single mental model: The past state and current state are the same, as follows (Byrne, 1997; Byrne & McEleney, 1997): Paul Current and past Company A Evidence for such models comes from studies of conditionals, such as the following: If George…”
Event detail and confidence in gambling: The role of counterfactual thought reactions (2010, background): “The likelihood of engaging in counterfactual thinking requires that mental models are developed by chaining together specific pieces of information to form inferences (Byrne, 1997, 2005; Feeney & Handley, 2006). The idea that event detail is predictive of counterfactual generation is also consistent”