Counterfactual Reasoning Research Articles

When the alternative would have been better: Counterfactual reasoning and the emergence of regret

Counterfactual reasoning about how events could have turned out better is associated with the feeling of regret. However, developmental studies show a discrepancy between the onset of counterfactual reasoning (at 3 years) and the feeling of regret (at 6 years). In four experiments we explored possible reasons. Experiment 1 (3- to 6-year-old children) and Experiment 2 (adult control) show that even when regret is assessed more directly than in previous studies (e.g., Amsel & Smalley, 2000) only adults but not children regret their decision. Experiment 3 (3- to 14-year-old children) suggests that double-questioning—asking children how happy they are with what they got before and after they had seen what they could have got—creates false positive indications of regret in the youngest children and that—when controlling for false positives—regret is not evident before 9 years. However, children before this age make a difference between attractive (three candies) and less attractive (one candy) items (Experiment 4; 6- to 8-year-old children). Taken together, this suggests that before 9 years of age children base their judgements solely on what they got without taking into account what they could have got.

Explaining and Interpreting the End of Soviet Rule

The dissolution of Soviet Union was a world-historical event. Understanding rare events is notoriously difficult. What is it a case of? With what should it be compared? How can it be explained? My approach to these questions is grounded in my disciplinary background in sociology and my interest in cultural mechanisms that drive systemic change. A cultural approach, rooted in logic of process-tracing, helps both to define object of interest--what exactly ended, if indeed it is over--and to understand what happened to it. The title of this article reflects choices I made in cutting into enormous literature on this subject. First, I follow Stephen Cohen's lead in using term rather than to define historical process of interest. Collapse, he maintains, implies inherently terminal causes.... If we ask instead how and why Union was abolished, dissolved, disbanded, or simply ended, formulation leaves open possibility that contingencies or subjective factors may have been primary cause and therefore that a different outcome was possible. (1) Imagining different possible outcomes is at core of counterfactual reasoning, a method that enables us to explain rare events by analyzing sequences of events within cases and identifying mechanisms that make causal arguments theoretically plausible. (2) The term rather than also opens possibility of a prolonged process, brought about by human agency rather than a natural cataclysm. (3) Second, I conceptualize object that ended in terms of Soviet Much of literature demarcates end with disintegration of formal institutions such as Communist Party or polity of USSR. Typically Soviet Union is described as a party-state, a system, or a regime. That system, according to Cohen and other political scientists, consisted of official ideology, authoritarian political rule, economic monopoly, and a multinational federation. However, Soviet Union was more than a state or an economy. It encompassed a set of taken-for-granted and practices that constituted a style of life and signified legitimate authority that had moved beyond ideology to become common sense, or what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls doxa. In a doxic social system, dominant groups possess power: that is, capacity to impose their definitions of social world and to establish legitimate rules (both formal and informal) that govern social relations. (4) My exposition privileges cultural explanations of process by which symbolic power, both among elites and masses, was lost. This is not to deny importance of material conditions as triggers of cultural change. Culture, as symbolic dimension of human existence, renders material conditions meaningful and provides templates for action, which in turn have material consequences. In other words, a focus on culture helps explain, in words of Georgi Derluguian, another sociologist inspired by Bourdieu, the causal connections and how one gets from historical point A to point B: that is, the social mechanisms involved in formulating and spreading competing discourses and their institutionalization in material and geopolitical terms. (5) Third, I seek to interpret as well as to explain end of Soviet rule, by asking what Soviet power came to mean after formal collapse of Soviet Union. The first section of article concentrates on scholarly explanations for dissolution of Soviet rule. In second section, I turn to emic explanations--beliefs about end of Soviet epoch among those who experienced it. My goal is not to evaluate veracity of such claims but to understand their meanings in post-Soviet context, as well as to treat them as evidence for persistence of some elements of Soviet rule. Explaining End: Approaches to Collapse Before turning to cultural approaches to explaining what ended, how, and why, I briefly describe alternative approaches, which concentrate on collapse of a state and/or a system. …

Paradoxes and Pitfalls in Using Fuzzy Set QCA: Illustrations from a Critical Review of a Study of Educational Inequality

Charles Ragin's crisp set and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA and fsQCA) are being used by increasing numbers of social scientists interested in combining analytic rigour with case-based approaches. As with all techniques that become available in easy-to-use software packages, there is a danger that QCA will come to be used in a routinised manner, with not enough attention being paid to its particular strengths and weaknesses. Users of fsQCA in particular need to be very aware of particular problems that can arise when fuzzy logic lies behind their analyses. This paper aims to increase its readers' understanding of some of these problems and of some means by which they might be alleviated. We use a critical discussion of a recent paper by Freitag and Schlicht addressing social inequality in education in Germany as our vehicle. After summarising the substantive claims of the paper, we explain some key features of QCA. We subsequently discuss two main issues, (i) limited diversity and the various ways of using counterfactual reasoning to address it, and (ii) the logical paradoxes that can arise when using fsQCA. Making different choices than Freitag and Schlicht do in respect of dealing with these two issues, we undertake some reanalysis of their data, showing that their conclusions must be treated with some caution. We end by drawing some general lessons for users of QCA.

From Borrowing to Blending: Rethinking the Processes of Organizational Theory Building

Why are there not more original and radical theories in organization theory? To answer this question, we consider an overreliance on “theory borrowing” from other disciplines. We identify a dominant foreign to domestic to domesticated pattern of organization and management theory building and propose that the prevalent process of one-way borrowing from outside the discipline should be counterbalanced by a two-way analogical process of conceptual blending, which involves dissonant thinking, disanalogy, and counterfactual reasoning.

The Problem of Counterfactuals in Substituted Judgement Decision‐Making

abstractThe standard by which we apply decision‐making for those unable to do so for themselves is an important practical ethical issue with substantial implications for the treatment and welfare of such individuals. The approach to proxy or surrogate decision‐making based upon substituted judgement is often seen as the ideal standard to aim for but suffers from a need to provide a clear account of how to determine the validity of the proxy's judgements. Proponents have responded to this demand by providing the truth‐conditions for the substituted judgement in terms of counterfactual reasoning using a possible worlds semantics. In this paper, I show how these underpinnings fail to support the substituted judgement approach as a reasonable standard for decision‐making. Firstly, I show how this counterfactual element has been poorly interpreted. I then explain how various accounts have failed to reflect problems and limitations associated with providing an interpretation of their truth‐conditions using counterfactuals. Finally, I argue that, even when we attend to the initial problems of providing a counterfactual analysis, it still deeply problematic as a means of determining the validity of substituted judgements for two main reasons. Firstly, making determinate judgements as to the truth‐value of these judgements will often not be possible and, secondly, there is a strong requirement when interpreting many counterfactual claims to charitably accede to their being true. I conclude that substituted judgements, as interpreted through counterfactual reasoning and possible worlds semantics, do not therefore provide an adequate standard for surrogate decision‐making.

International Financial Reporting Standards and Aggressive Reporting: An Investigation of Proposed Auditor Judgment Guidance

We experimentally investigate auditors’ judgments under accounting standards that differ in their precision. After establishing conditions under which auditors accept managements’ aggressive financial reporting, we examine the effectiveness of alternative judgment frameworks in helping auditors curb this aggressive reporting under less precise International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and more precise U.S. GAAP. One of our frameworks is based on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting’s (CIFiR) recommendation to use counterfactual reasoning. Another framework based on Construal Level Theory requires auditors to think broadly about a transaction, while our last framework is based on both counterfactual reasoning and Construal Level Theory. We find that auditors’ ability to restrain managers’ opportunistic judgments under less precise IFRS depends on the economic substance of the transaction. We also find that a judgment framework helps auditors curb managements’ aggressive accounting under IFRS. Additionally, the judgment frameworks based on Construal Level Theory are more effective than the framework based on CIFiR’s proposed judgment guidance when the transaction’s economic substance is clear, while the framework based on CIFiR’s proposed guidance is just as effective when the economic substance is unclear. These results inform regulators, standard-setters, and auditors on the effectiveness of different judgment guidance in improving auditors’ judgments under less precise IFRS.

The algorithmization of counterfactuals

Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computation model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Though compatible with the “possible worlds” account, this model enjoys the advantages of representational economy, algorithmic simplicity and conceptual clarity. Using this model, the paper demonstrates the processing of counterfactual sentences on a classical example due to Ernest Adam. It then gives a panoramic view of several applications where counterfactual reasoning has benefited problem areas in the empirical sciences.

The Influence of Domains of Causality on Young Children's Counterfactual Reasoning

The Influence of Domains of Causality on Young Children's Counterfactual Reasoning

A logic for reasoning about counterfactual emotions

The aim of this work is to propose a logical framework for the specification of cognitive emotions that are based on counterfactual reasoning about agents' choices. The prototypical counterfactual emotion is regret. In order to meet this objective, we exploit the well-known STIT logic (Belnap et al. (2001) [9], Horty (2001) [30], Horty and Belnap (1995) [31]). STIT logic has been proposed in the domain of formal philosophy in the nineties and, more recently, it has been imported into the field of theoretical computer science where its formal relationships with other logics for multi-agent systems such as ATL and Coalition Logic ( CL) have been studied. STIT is a very suitable formalism to reason about choices and capabilities of agents and groups of agents. Unfortunately, the version of STIT with agents and groups has been recently proved to be undecidable and not finitely axiomatizable. In this work we study a decidable and finitely axiomatizable fragment of STIT with agents and groups which is sufficiently expressive for our purpose of formalizing counterfactual emotions. We call df STIT our STIT fragment. After having extended df STIT with knowledge modalities, in the second part of article, we exploit it in order to formalize four types of counterfactual emotions: regret, rejoicing, disappointment, and elation. At the end of the article we present an application of our formalization of counterfactual emotions to a concrete example.

Counterfactual thinking and false belief: The role of executive function

The purpose of the current study was to examine further the relationship between counterfactual thinking and false belief (FB) as examined by Guajardo and Turley-Ames ( Cognitive Development, 19 (2004) 53–80). More specifically, the current research examined the importance of working memory and inhibitory control in understanding the relationship between counterfactual thinking and FB. Participants were 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds ( N = 76). Counterfactual thinking statements generated accounted for significant variance in FB performance beyond age and language. Working memory and inhibitory control each partially mediated the relationship between counterfactual thinking and FB performance. The maturation of executive functioning skills is important in children’s developing understanding of counterfactual reasoning and FB.

Counterfactual reasoning and the problem of selecting antecedent scenarios

A recent group of social scientists have argued that counterfactual questions play an essential role in their disciplines, and that it is possible to have rigorous methods to investigate them. Unfortunately, there has been little (if any) interaction between these social scientists and the philosophers who have long held that rigorous counterfactual reasoning is possible. In this paper, I hope to encourage some fresh thinking on both sides by creating new connections between them. I describe what I term “problem of selecting antecedent scenarios,” and show that this is an essential challenge in real-life counterfactual reasoning. Then, I demonstrate that the major extant theories of counterfactuals (especially the Lewis/Stalnaker theory and Igal Kvart’s rival account) are unable to solve this problem. I show that there are instances of real-life counterfactual reasoning in the social sciences that are counterexamples to both of these accounts. And finally, I develop a new theory of how to select antecedent scenarios that overcomes these difficulties, and so would be part of a more adequate theory of counterfactuals (and counterfactual reasoning).

Young children's counterfactual reasoning and make-believe

Young children's counterfactual reasoning and make-believe

The effect of causal chain length on counterfactual conditional reasoning

We investigated German and Nichols' finding that 3-year-olds could answer counterfactual conditional questions about short causal chains of events, but not long. In four experiments (N = 192), we compared 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on short and long causal chain questions, manipulating whether the child could draw on general knowledge to answer. We failed to replicate German and Nichols' result, finding instead that in two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) there was no difference in performance on short and long causal chain questions and in two experiments (Experiments 2 and 4) children showed the opposite pattern: short causal chain questions were more difficult than long. These two unexpected patterns of results were replicated in a fifth study (N = 97). Children with lower language ability found short causal chains more difficult than long. Performance by children with higher language ability was unaffected by the length of the causal chain they had to consider. We found no evidence that children showed precocious counterfactual thinking when asked about recent events in a causal chain and conclude that counterfactual thinking develops after 4 years of age.

Necessary for Possession: How People Reason About the Acquisition of Ownership

For property rights to be upheld, people need to be able to judge how ownership is established. Previous research suggests that people may judge that the first person to possess an object establishes ownership over it. This article proposes and tests an alternative account, which claims that people decide who owns an object by judging who was probably necessary for the object to be possessed. Participants read stories in which one character pursues an object (e.g., an animal being hunted, a gem jutting out of a high cliff), which a second character then captures. Judgments about which character owns the object depended on which character was plausibly necessary for capturing the object. The findings support the "necessary for possession" account and suggest that people's judgments about ownership likely depend on counterfactual reasoning or on processes akin to those used to make judgments about causality.

Pretense and imagination.

Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: the psychological underpinnings of performing pretense and of recognizing pretense, the cognitive capacities involved in imaginative engagement with fictions, and the real-world impact of make-believe. In the final section, we discuss more briefly a number of other mental activities that arguably involve imagining, including counterfactual reasoning, delusions, and dreaming. WIREs Cogn Sci 2011 2 79-94 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.91 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Intervention, determinism, and the causal minimality condition

We clarify the status of the so-called causal minimality condition in the theory of causal Bayesian networks, which has received much attention in the recent literature on the epistemology of causation. In doing so, we argue that the condition is well motivated in the interventionist (or manipulability) account of causation, assuming the causal Markov condition which is essential to the semantics of causal Bayesian networks. Our argument has two parts. First, we show that the causal minimality condition, rather than an add-on methodological assumption of simplicity, necessarily follows from the substantive interventionist theses, provided that the actual probability distribution is strictly positive. Second, we demonstrate that the causal minimality condition can fail when the actual probability distribution is not positive, as is the case in the presence of deterministic relationships. But we argue that the interventionist account still entails a pragmatic justification of the causal minimality condition. Our argument in the second part exemplifies a general perspective that we think commendable: when evaluating methods for inferring causal structures and their underlying assumptions, it is relevant to consider how the inferred causal structure will be subsequently used for counterfactual reasoning.

Is reasoning from counterfactual antecedents evidence for counterfactual reasoning?

In most developmental studies the only error children could make on counterfactual tasks was to answer with the current state of affairs. It was concluded that children who did not show this error are able to reason counterfactually. However, children might have avoided this error by using basic conditional reasoning (Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010). Basic conditional reasoning takes background assumptions represented as conditionals about how the world works. If an antecedent of one of these conditionals is provided by the task, then a likely conclusion can be inferred based only on background assumptions. A critical feature of counterfactual reasoning is that the selection of these additional assumptions is constrained by actual events to which the counterfactual is taken to be counterfactual. In contrast, in basic conditional reasoning one enriches the given antecedent with any plausible assumptions, unconstrained by actual events. In our tasks basic conditional reasoning leads to different answers from counterfactual reasoning. For instance, a doctor, sitting in the park with the intention of reading a paper, is called to an emergency at the swimming pool. The question, “If there had been no emergency, where would the doctor be?” should counterfactually be answered “in the park”. But by ignoring the doctor's intentions, and just reasoning from premises about the default location of a hospital doctor who has not been called out to an emergency, one might answer: “in the hospital”. Only by 6 years of age did children mostly give correct answers.

Causality: models, reasoning, and inference

This book seeks to integrate research on cause and effect inference from cognitive science, econometrics, epidemiology, philosophy, and statistics. It puts forward the work of its author, his collaborators, and others over the past two decades as a new account of cause and effect inference that can aid practical researchers in many fields, including econometrics. Pearl adheres to several propositions on cause and effect inference. Though cause and effect relations are fundamentally deterministic (he explicitly excludes quantum mechanical phenomena from his concept of cause and effect), cause and effect analysis involves probability language. Probability language helps to convey uncertainty about cause and effect relations but is insufficient to fully express those relations. In addition to conditional probabilities of events, cause and effect analysis requires graphs or diagrams and a language that distinguishes intervention or manipulation from observation. Cause and effect analysis also requires counterfactual reasoning and causal assumptions in addition to observations and statistical assumptions. Chapter 1 sketches some of the ingredients of the new approach to cause and effect inference: probability theory, graphs, Bayesian causal networks, causal models, and causal and statistical terminology. Chapter 2 builds the elements of Chapter 1 into a theory of inferred causation. Chapter 3 focuses on causal diagrams and identifying causal effects. Chapter 4 studies intervention or manipulation and direct causal effects. Chapter 5 considers causality and structural equation models. Chapter 6 examines Simpson's paradox and confounding. Chapter 7 blends structural modeling with counterfactual reasoning. Chapter 8 is an approach to imperfect random assignment experiments through bounding effects and counterfactuals. Chapter 9 analyzes notions of necessary cause and sufficient cause. Chapter 10 explicates a concept of single event causality. The epilogue is a public lecture that Pearl gave at UCLA that, in mostly not too technical language, places the new approach to causality within the long history of thought on the subject. The interdisciplinary nature of the book, a great strength, at times makes it difficult to read because its theory of inferred causation blends the languages

Backward Induction and Common Strong Belief of Rationality

In 1995, Aumann showed that in games of perfect information, knowledge of rationality is consistent and entails the backward induction (BI) outcome. That work has been criticized because it uses reasoning|what a player would do if he reached a node that he knows he will not reach, indeed that he himself has excluded by one of his own previous moves. This paper derives an epistemological characterization of BI that is outwardly reminiscent of Aumann's, but avoids counterfactual reasoning. Speci fically, we say that a player strongly believes a proposition at a node of the game tree if he believes the proposition unless it is logically inconsistent with that node having been reached. We then show that strong belief of rationality is consistent and entails the BI outcome, where as with knowledge|the word common signi es strong belief, strong belief of strong belief, and so on ad in nitum. Our result is related to|though not easily derivable from one obtained by Battigalli and Sinischalchi. Their proof is, however, much deeper; it uses a full-blown semantic model of probabilities, and belief is de nied as attribution of probability 1. However, we work with a syntactic model, de nying belief directly by a sound and complete set of axioms, and the proof is relatively direct.

Counterfactual reasoning and method in historical geography

This paper connects philosophical debate concerning the metaphysics and epistemology of counterfactuals to the methodological concerns of historical geography. It argues that counterfactual claims are implied by a wide range of common epistemic judgements, specifically those regarding evidential support and explanatory connection. In addition it argues against those who have sought to restrict the use of counterfactuals to, in particular, rational action, or systems that are inherently chancy. Rather it argues in favour of an expanded role for counterfactual method in history and geography, in the forms of imaginary experiments and the questioning of ‘what might have been’.