Counterfactual Beliefs Research Articles

My language ability could have been better or worse: Examining how upward and downward counterfactual thinking predict self-efficacy and language performance

Counterfactual beliefs are ideas about how one’s past could have been better (upward counterfactuals) and worse (downward counterfactuals). In this study, we investigated how language learners’ upward and downward counterfactual beliefs about their language ability were related to their self-efficacy and performance. In so doing, we examined the mediating role of learners’ different sources of self-efficacy. The study sample included 320 Iranian intermediate level language learners (190 males and 130 females) at a language institute in Isfahan, Iran. The results of the study indicated that upward counterfactual thinking was negatively related to self-efficacy and language performance, while downward counterfactual thinking positively predicted self-efficacy. Moreover, the results showed that upward counterfactual thinking predicted self-efficacy indirectly via the mediation of four sources of self-efficacy (mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and emotional and physiological states) and language performance through the mediation of vicarious experiences and verbal persuasion. In addition, downward counterfactual thinking indirectly predicted self-efficacy through the mediation of vicarious experiences and emotional and physiological states, as well as language performance via the mediation of vicarious experiences.

Nietzsche's Last Will

Nietzsche's Last Will

Counterfactual attitude contents and the semantics of plurals in belief contexts

Indefinites in the complement clause of believe may participate in cumulative relations with a plural attitude subject, even under an intensional reading (Schmitt 2020; see also Pasternak 2018). Schmitt (2020) provides a compositional semantics for such constructions, where indefinites introduce pluralities of partial individual concepts. Crucially, however, such pluralities can only be formed if, intuitively, the concepts are ‘distinct enough’ (Haslinger and Schmitt to appear). We here implement this ‘distinctness constraint’ compositionally, combining Schmitt’s (2020) ideas with a new proposal concerning the semantics of plural indefinites: We argue that the latter introduce a distinctness requirement that appeals to the attitude subjects’ counterfactual beliefs – a requirement that is visible in cumulative belief sentences, but is trivialized (and thus unnoticeable) in extensional contexts. To compose our new DP-denotations with other material in the sentence, we use a version of Yalcin’s (2007) ‘domain semantics’.

Perfect Prediction in normal form: Superrational thinking extended to non-symmetric games

This paper introduces a new solution concept for non-cooperative games in normal form with no ties and pure strategies: the Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium. The players are rational in all possible worlds and know each other’s strategies in all possible worlds — which, together, we refer to as Perfect Prediction. The anticipation of a player’s decision by their opponents is counterfactually dependent on the decision, unlike in Nash Equilibria where the decisions are made independently. The equilibrium, when it exists, is unique and is Pareto optimal.This equilibrium is the normal-form counterpart of the Perfect Prediction Equilibrium; the prediction happens “in another room” rather than in the past. The equilibrium can also be seen as a natural extension of Hofstadter’s superrationality to non-symmetric games. Algorithmically, an iterated elimination of non-individually-rational strategy profiles is performed until at most one remains. An equilibrium is a strategy profile that is immune against knowledge of strategies in all possible worlds and rationality in all possible worlds, a stronger concept than common knowledge of rationality but also stronger than common counterfactual belief of rationality.We formalize and contrast the Non-Nashian Decision Theory paradigm, common to this and several other papers, with Causal Decision Theory and Evidential Decision Theory. We define the Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium algorithmically and prove (when it exists) that it is unique, that it is Pareto-optimal, and that it coincides with Hofstadter’s Superrationality on symmetric games. We relate the finding to concepts found in the literature such as Individual Rationality, Rationalizability, Minimax-Rationalizability, Second-Order Nash Equilibria, the Program Equilibrium, the Perfect Prediction Equilibrium, Shiffrin’s Joint-Selfish-Rational Equilibrium, the Stalnaker–Bonanno Equilibrium, the Perfect Cooperation Equilibrium, the Translucent Equilibrium, the Correlated Equilibrium, and Quantum Games. Finally, we specifically discuss inclusion relationships on the special case of symmetric games between Individual Rationality, Minimax-Rationalizability, Superrationality, and the Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium, and contrast them with asymmetric games.

Where Bias Begins: a Snapshot of Police Officers\u2019 Beliefs About Factors that Influence the Investigative Interview with Suspects

The aim of the current study was to obtain a snapshot of police officer’s beliefs about factors that may influence the outcome of the investigative interview with suspects. We created a 26-item survey that contained statements around three specific themes: best interview practices, confessions and interviewee vulnerabilities. Police officers (N = 101) reported their beliefs on each topic by indicating the level of agreement or disagreement with each statement. The findings indicated that this sample of officers held beliefs that were mostly consistent with the literature. However, many officers also responded in the mid-range (neither agree nor disagree) which may indicate they are open to developing literature-consistent beliefs of the topics. Understanding what officers believe about factors within the investigative interview may have implications for future training. It may also help explain why some officers do not consistently apply best practices (i.e. strong counterfactual beliefs) versus officers who reliably apply literature-consistent practices to their interviews (i.e. knowledge-consistent beliefs).

Game theory with translucent players

A traditional assumption in game theory is that players are opaque to one another—if a player changes strategies, then this change in strategies does not affect the choice of other players’ strategies. In many situations this is an unrealistic assumption. We develop a framework for reasoning about games where the players may be translucent to one another; in particular, a player may believe that if she were to change strategies, then the other player would also change strategies. Translucent players may achieve significantly more efficient outcomes than opaque ones. Our main result is a characterization of strategies consistent with appropriate analogues of common belief of rationality. Common Counterfactual Belief of Rationality (CCBR) holds if (1) everyone is rational, (2) everyone counterfactually believes that everyone else is rational (i.e., all players i believe that everyone else would still be rational even if i were to switch strategies), (3) everyone counterfactually believes that everyone else is rational, and counterfactually believes that everyone else is rational, and so on. CCBR characterizes the set of strategies surviving iterated removal of minimax-dominated strategies, where a strategy $$\sigma $$ for player i is minimax dominated by $$\sigma '$$ if the worst-case payoff for i using $$\sigma '$$ is better than the best possible payoff using $$\sigma $$ .

Expert Advice and Optimal Project Termination

I analyze how a firm should elicit advice from an expert on when to terminate a project with a stochastic lifespan. The firm cannot directly observe the project's lifespan, but imperfectly monitors its current state by observing incremental output. The expert directly observes the state of the project, but prefers to delay termination as much as possible. He possesses no capital and enjoys limited liability, so cannot be sold the project. The optimal long-term contract involves termination payments to the expert and a stochastic project deadline, which is calculated based on the counterfactual beliefs the firm would have held about the state of the project had it received no expert advice. I sharply characterize the efficiency impact of hiring an expert, and show how the optimal contract changes when the expert has initial capital, can be replaced, or can be assigned busywork on the job.

Horizontal Unfairness and Retrospective Sensemaking

In this article, I aim at problematizing the implied idea of causality in cognitive evaluations of horizontal justice events. I will draw on theories about retrospective sensemaking and its cognitive foundation in counterfactual belief formation. Issues related to horizontal or intraunit unfairness emerge in situations in which the actions of one employee influence the outcome of another due to relational interdependence. The authors of theories about horizontal unfairness have continued the traditional distinction between the three facets of justice, procedural, distributive, and interactional. However, might employee A blame employee B because she (B) obtained qualitative (e.g., non-monetary appraisal) or quantitative (e.g., monetary compensation) recognition even though the latter did not, directly at least, bring about the event. The problem here is one of causality which asks the question, Can A be blamed by B for bringing about the event of outcome difference? While blame in evaluations of vertical justice certainly presumes causal agency, it might be questioned whether the same goes for horizontal unfairness. Counterfactual belief formation enables a step into the cognitive and retrospective nature of evaluations of horizontal justice events centered on the counterfactual belief “had the unfavorable event X not occurred, another and more favorable event X1 would have occurred.” This is related to the distance between the actual X and the potential event state X), in the sense that the closer the two appear, the more convincing becomes A’s belief to himself. The underlying causality of rewarding processes, however, states that some third party introduces the recognition, for example, a manager, and, therefore, B did not bring about the reward event, the third party did. It seems, then, that to understand this, we should take into consideration: 1) the formation of counterfactual beliefs and 2) the causality of blame. The article concludes that, due to the underlying causality of rewarding processes, one might solely consider one facet of horizontal justice, interactional horizontal justice. However, tapping into the phenomenological dimension of morality might allow one also to address the moral nature of distributive and procedural facets of horizontal justice as the experience of the psychosocial fabric of social reality related with feeling either “as if” one is being treated unfairly or “as if” one is treating others unfairly.

Community-Based Reasoning in Games: Salience, Rule-Following, and Counterfactuals

This paper develops a game-theoretic and epistemic account of a peculiar mode of practical reasoning that sustains focal points but also more general forms of rule-following behavior which I call community-based reasoning (CBR). It emphasizes the importance of counterfactuals in strategic interactions. In particular, the existence of rules does not reduce to observable behavioral patterns but also encompasses a range of counterfactual beliefs and behaviors. This feature was already at the core of Wittgenstein’s philosophical account of rule-following. On this basis, I consider the possibility that CBR may provide a rational basis for cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma.

Why follow the royal rule?

This note is a sequel to Huber (Synthese 191:2167–2193, 2014). It is shown that obeying a normative principle relating counterfactual conditionals and conditional beliefs, viz. the royal rule, is a necessary and sufficient means to attaining a cognitive end that relates true beliefs in purely factual, non-modal propositions and true beliefs in purely modal propositions. Along the way I will sketch my idealism about alethic or metaphysical modality.

Working in the Transference and Promoting Self-determination: Treating Beliefs as Opinions Rather than Certainties

We have all been in situations in which others have retained their beliefs despite evidence to the contrary. Instead of treating beliefs as opinions that can be modified, they use beliefs as facts that limit their relationships and opportunities. In this article, a short literature review and three vignettes are presented that discuss and demonstrate how to work with and, when appropriate, modify counterfactual beliefs within the transference. Issues of self-determination, the unconscious, countertransference, and some Kleinian concepts such as the third, containment, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are also explored.

The predictive role of counterfactuals

We suggest a model that describes how counterfactuals are constructed and justified. The model can describe how counterfactual beliefs are updated given the unfolding of actual history. It also allows us to examine the use of counterfactuals in prediction, and to show that a logically omniscient reasoner gains nothing from using counterfactuals for prediction.

When is Negligent Inadvertence Culpable?

Doug Husak suggests that sometimes an actor should be deemed reckless, and not merely negligent, with respect to the risks that she knowingly created but has forgotten at the moment of action. The validity of this conclusion, he points out, depends crucially on what it means to be aware of a risk. Husak’s “neutral prompt” and “counterfactual actual belief” criteria are problematic, however. More persuasive is his suggestion that we understand belief, in this moral and criminal law context, as a concept whose meaning is determined by its function as a culpability standard. Husak concludes that inadvertent actors are often less culpable than knowing-but-later-forgetful actors; this is plausible, but there are also numerous counterexamples.

Why should I be left behind? Employees’ perceived relative deprivation and participation in development activities.

Research on participation in development activities (PDA) has traditionally been examined from an advantage perspective: Employees engage in development activities out of a desire to enhance current and future advantages. In this study, the author examined PDA from a disadvantage perspective, which suggests that employees participate in development activities out of a desire to redress perceived disadvantages. Perceived individual relative deprivation was hypothesized to relate to PDA through intention to participate and counterfactual beliefs, and perceived behavioral control was proposed to interact with intention to participate in relating to development behaviors. In a sample of 144 employees from 27 companies in Ghana, an emerging economy, moderated structural equation modeling results confirm some of the hypotheses. Implications for PDA research and human resource management are discussed.

Ethics and Economic Success

People in Germany might think you’re joking if you were to tell them that you study Business Ethics. Either Business, or Ethics. This basically sums up the deep-seated belief in European culture that business andmorals aremutually exclusive. Tipping the balance toward ethics means less economic efficiency, while an increase in business profits means less moral integrity. That is why in the Bible it is easier for a camel togo throughaneedle’s eye than for amanofwealth toget into the kingdom of God, why Plato devoted many pages of his dialog on The Republic to how to regulate the market, why for Aristotle, an economist is someone who lacks the telos of human existence, why Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica took nearly one hundred pages to explain how aneconomic trade canbe turned into a fair trade,why it is clear to Karl Marx that capitalism is the absolute embodiment of immorality, why for Max Weber there is no room for ethics within the iron bounds of competition and why, last but not least, the Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedmann, can say that the only ethics of businesses is to increase profits. Those who are currently reflecting on the connection between business success and being ethical should not lose sight of the cultural standard just described, especially bearing in mind the realities of the economic situation we face today. Corruption, the effects of the financial crisis, and management criminality are just a few of those realities that are dominating the headlines. Emotionally churned-up debates about the greed and coldheartedness of the business world’s elite managers, about criminal and questionable management methods to the detriment of the owner, customer, and society, go hand in hand with scenarios that depict our decline in values, eliciting pleas for the return of the honorable businessman of the Middle Ages. The reputation and credibility of whole sectors and to a certain extent the market economy system itself is at stake. But as so often, appearances are deceptive. Generally speaking, there can be no economic success in moral anarchy. This has also been experienced in economic history and is apparently reflected in the recently developing cultural distrust for business. Unfortunately, science up to now has also been unable to provide clarity here. On a scientific level there is simply no clear and causal evidence that good ethics means good business. Results from studies carried out so far have not been methodologically conclusive due to an inconsistent definition of indicators: findings often turn out to be contradictory. However, insights currently gained by many companies indicate: a corporate strategy that is oriented toward values and implementing them at an operational level is an essential prerequisite today for economic success in modern and globally operating companies and their management. If the interplay of the economy and ethics were to be a success story it would consequently not result from a causal automatism but rather be a question of the morally sensible design of the governance structures of a company’s management. Here are a few empirical explanations for this apparently counterfactual belief. The economic scandals of the most recent past have shown that illegal and immoral behavior is a value-destroyer in the most direct sense of the word. A lack of values in management or the application of undesired values poses a risk to the existence of companies. It is a moral risk from behavior that should be an integral part of modern risk management and corporate governance. The US and British legal systems have drawn their consequences. They have set behavioral standards for the fulfillment of companies’ due diligence requirements and demand that value management systems be installed to ensure they are complied with. Compliance is worth it. Noncompliance means the organization and its representatives can incur massive risks. In this respect, character, credibility, and integrity are central leadership qualities and represent future topics to be encountered in manager training programs. However the impressionof the direction takenby theUSA and UK to strengthen business ethics is a rather bureaucratic one, and that is putting itmildly. Exculpation bywayof extensive documentation appears to be the logic behind the system: code of ethics, code of conduct, compliance officer, SOX, COSO framework, compliance program, integrity management, whistle blowing, ethics hotline – are just some of the Anglicisms that are rapidly proliferating at present and are not welcomed on all executive floors in the business world.

Long Ago It Was Meant to Be: The Interplay Between Time, Construal, and Fate Beliefs

Fate means that an event was meant to be, that is, predetermined by prior unseen forces. Most people believe in fate, which seems at odds with similarly pervasive beliefs that alternative past actions would have brought about different circumstances (i.e., counterfactual beliefs). Two experiments revealed that construal level accounts for the relative plausibility of fate versus counterfactual explanations. Construal was manipulated in Experiment 1, such that goal pursuits framed in abstract ("why?") as opposed to concrete ("how?") terms heightened fate but not counterfactual attributions. Extending this finding, Experiment 2 showed that fate judgments were higher for temporally distant than recent past events, an effect mediated by construal perceptions. Neither counterfactual nor luck judgments varied with temporal distance. These findings help to explain how individuals explain complicated yet meaningful life events while extending the reach of Trope and Liberman's (2003) construal-level theory.

The role of the counterfactually satisfied desire in the lag between false‐belief and false‐emotion attributions in children aged 4–7

A robust lag was evidenced between the attribution to an individual of a false belief about the world and the attribution of the false emotion associated with this false belief (Bradmetz & Schneider, 1999). This lag was unexpected in the frame of current theories of mind which consider that emotion has a rational cognitive basis. The present paper refers to the theory of appraisal which links emotion to the belief about desire satisfaction rather than the belief concerning the state of the world. The authors claim that, even if counterfactual belief is understood, the associated emotion and belief about counterfactual satisfaction of desire are not automatically understood because they depend on the success of an action. Two experiments conducted on happiness, fear, and anger confirmed this view: Attributing false belief about counterfactual desire satisfaction is much more difficult than attributing false belief about a current state of affairs, and the emotion attributed to the individual is more closely linked to a belief about desire than to a belief about the world. A four‐step developmental sequence is proposed, and the link between action and realist bias is discussed.

Subjective Rationality, Self–Confirming Equilibrium, and Corporate Strategy

This paper presents a formal theory of subjective rationality and demonstrates its application to corporate strategy. An agent is said to be subjectively rational when decisions are consistent with the available facts and, where these are lacking, with the agent's own subjective assessments. A self–confirming equilibrium arises when agents' subjectively rational actions generate events that are consistent with their own expectations. Equilibrium strategies may be suboptimal because certain counterfactual beliefs may be erroneous and yet fail to be contradicted by events observed in equilibrium. This weakening of the stronger rationality assumptions inherent in many of the more familiar equilibrium ideas appears well suited to applications in strategy. In particular, performance advantage may be sustained by a firm when its subjectively rational competitors persistently employ suboptimal self–confirming strategies.

Theory-Driven Reasoning About Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics: Are We Prisoners of Our Preconceptions?

Cognitive theories predict that even experts cope with the complexities and ambiguities of world politics by resorting to theory-driven heuristics that allow them: (a) to make confident counterfactual inferences about what would have happened had history gone down a different path (plausible pasts); (b) to generate predictions about what might yet happen (probable futures); (c) to defend both counterfactual beliefs and conditional forecasts from potentially disconfirming data. An interrelated series of studies test these predictions by assessing correlations between ideological world view and beliefs about counterfactual histories (Studies 1 and 2), experimentally manipulating the results of hypothetical archival discoveries bearing on those counterfactual beliefs (Studies 3-5), and by exploring experts' reactions to the confirmation or disconfirmation of conditional forecasts (Studies 6-12). The results revealed that experts neutralize dissonant data and preserve confidence in their prior assessments by resorting to a complex battery of beliefsystem defenses that, epistemologically defensible or not, make learning from history a slow process and defections from theoretical camps a rarity.

Persons and available identities: Gender in Hegel's philosophy of law

There is certainly a paradox in all this but it is not that of the constitution and the counterfactual beliefs it demands of us. It is rather that in the absence of Hegel's inspiration and of the actual closure on the dialectic of freedom that justifies his claims, his accomplishment, the logical reconstruction of modern Western ideas of right, would not have been possible. Some will cry irony in the face of this paradox and well they might. My argument,vis a vis Hegel isad hominem. But it is not made for the purpose of irony. It is made in the hope of recovering Hegel's sense of the ambiguity of tautology from the straitjacket of our legal and ethical thought. I would hope then to use this paradox to subvert anidee fixe — that right is right — and develop, from the lives of those whom the constitution has stripped bare, our understanding of its wrong.