Recall The Cognitive Mechanism Of Counterfactual Reasoning

In daily life,people often use counterfactual reasoning.Counterfactual reasoning plays a key role in people’s interpretation,judgment and prediction of causal events.According to the direction of counterfactual reasoning,counterfactual reasoning can be classified into retrospective counterfactual reasoning and prospective counterfactual reasoning.Psychological explanations for prospective counterfactual reasoning are relatively consistent,and therefore focus more on retrospective counterfactual reasoning.There are some influential theoretical explanations for retrospective counterfactual reasoning:minimal networks model(MNM),the structural model(SM),extended structural model(ESM).Although these theories have different explanations for how people make counterfactual reasoning,they all believe that people’s counterfactual reasoning was based on the probabilistic information about category causality.In other words,the higher the base rate of cause,the stronger the causal strength,and the higher the probability of cause in counterfactual reasoning.However,these theories do not take into account the particular causality that has occurred on counterfactual reasoning.According to the realistic experience,we made assumption that people’s counterfactual reasoning was based on the factual information about particular causality.In view of this divergence,our study investigated whether people’s counterfactual reasoning was based on the probabilistic information about category causality or on the factual information about particular causality.Experiment 1 investigated retrospective counterfactual reasoning in the single-cause scenarios.The be tween-subjects factor was the presentation mode of probabilistic information about category causality,which had two conditions:combined presentation and particular presentation.The within-subjects factor was the setting of the probabilistic information about category causality and the factual information about particular causality,which was divided into two levels:the causal strength was 50%and the causal strength was 25%(in both levels,the base rates of the causes were 80%,and the realistic causality was the causes and effects were both present).Participants were asked to make counterfactual judgments about the causes and then to evaluate their confidence in the counterfactual judgments.The results showed that when the causality relationship was necessary and insufficient,people’s retrospective counterfactual reasoning was based on the factual information about particular causality.The presentation mode of probabilistic information about category causality affected people’s retrospective counterfactual reasoning.The proportion of response patterns based on particular causality in the particular presentation condition was significantly higher than the corresponding proportion in the combined presentation condition.The results were consistent with our prediction and were not consistent with the prediction of the extended structure model and minimum network model.Experiment 2 investigated retrospective counterfactual reasoning in the double-causes scenarios.The between-subjects factor was the same as those in experiment 1.The within-subjects factor was the setting of the probabilistic information about category causality and the factual information about particular causality,which included four conditions.For each condition,participants were asked to make counterfactual judgments about the causes and then to evaluate their confidence in the counterfactual judgments.The results showed that when the causality relationship was insufficient and unnecessary,people’s retrospective counterfactual reasoning was based on the factual information about particular causality.Moreover,in order to ensure that the state of the effect in the counterfactual premise(occurs/does not occur)must be established,people infer that the states of the causes(occurs/does not occur)were both consistent with the state of the effect in the counterfactual premise.The presentation mode of probabilistic information about category causality affected people’s retrospective counterfactual reasoning.The proportion of response patterns based on particular causality in the particular presentation condition was significantly higher than the corresponding proportion in the combined presentation condition.The results were consistent with our prediction and were not consistent with the prediction of the extended structure model and minimum network model.Although there were individual differences in people’s retrospective counterfactual reasoning,the dominant response was based on the factual information about particular causality,rather than on the probabilistic information about category causality.The results of this study supported the account about counterfactual reasoning based on the factual information about particular causality,but did not support the counterfactual reasoning theory based on the probabilistic information about category causality.The results of this study showed that people’s counterfactual reasoning was mainly based on the factual information about particular causality,rather than on the probabilistic information about category causality.