Counterfactual thinking about actions and failures to act.

By Ruth M. J. Byrne, Alice McEleney. 2000

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When people think counterfactually about how a situation could have turned out differently, they mentally undo events in regular ways (e.g., they focus on actions not failures to act). Four experiments examine the recent discovery that the focus on actions in the short term switches to inactions in the long term. The experiments show that this temporal switch occurs only for particular sorts of situations. Experiment 1 showed no temporal pattern to the agency effect when 112 participants judged emotional impact and frequency of "if-only" thoughts from both short- and long-term perspectives for an investment scenario. Experiment 2 showed no temporal pattern when 190 participants considered a college choice scenario with a good outcome. Experiment 3 showed no temporal pattern when 131 participants considered an investment scenario even when the situation for the actor and nonactor was bad from the outset. Experiment 4, with 113 participants, showed a focus on actions even when the investment loss was equal for both the actor and nonactor. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of what is explicitly available in the mental representation of actions and inactions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

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,…”
Reasoning counterfactually: making inferences about things that didn't happen. (2002, background): “Counterfactual thinking is pervasive in everyday life (e.g., Byrne & McEleney, 2000; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982), perhaps because it may be linked with causal thoughts (e.g., McCloy & Byrne, 2000, 2002; Roese & Olson, 1995) and because it has consequences for the experience of a range of emotions, s”
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).”
Counterfactual Thought. (2016, background): “The mental representation does not provide a ready-made counterfactual alternative (e.g., Byrne & McEleney 2000).”
The Functional Theory of Counterfactual Thinking (2008, background): “For example, the mental models perspective (Byrne, 1997, 2002, 2005; Byrne & McEleney, 2000; Feeney & Handley, 2006) has approached counterfactual thinking in terms of the basic building blocks of reasoning and how particular pieces of information are chained together to form inferences.”
Counterfactual thinking: The temporal order effect (2004, background): “People are more likely to undo exceptional than routine events (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982), actions than inactions (e.g., Byrne & McEleney, 2000; Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; N’gbala & Branscombe, 1995), controllable than uncontrollable events (Girotto, Legrenzi, & Rizzo, 1991; Mandel & Lehman, 1996;…”
Counterfactual Thinking: From Logic to Morality (2017, background): “She now finds out that she would have been better off by $1,200 if she had stayed (e.g., Byrne & McEleney, 2000; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a) Who feels more regret?”