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The Role of Counterfactual Thinking in Reasoning

✍ Scribed by STEVEN J. SHERMAN; ALLEN R. McCONNELL

Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
1996
Tongue
English
Weight
930 KB
Volume
10
Category
Article
ISSN
0888-4080

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

Counterfactual generation is an important part of reasoning. Both the judgment of events and affective reactions to those events depend not only on the events themselves, but on counterfactual alternatives to those events. Counterfactual thinking serves several positive functions. However, there are also dysfunctional aspects. First, judgments of general versus specific instances are often inconsistent, and this leads to problematic, irrational decisions. We explain these inconsistencies by suggesting that specific instances easily afford counterfactuals, and are judged in the context of these counterfactuals. Alternatively, general cases are evaluated in terms of quite different contrast cases, global expectations. Second, in assigning blame for the negative outcome of a chain of events, people assign too much causality to recent events. Our explanation is that these recent events are most accessible and are most likely to be mutated in the course of counterfactual generation. Such mutability is important in causal assignment.

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