A computational model of counterfactual thinking: The temporal order effect

Abstract

People generate counterfactual alternatives to realitywhen they think about how things might have happeneddifferently, 'if only?'. There are considerableregularities in the sorts of past events that peoplementally undo, for example, they tend to mentally undothe most recent event in an independent sequence.Consider a game in which two contestants will win#1000 if they both pick cards from the same color suite.The first player picks black and the second red and theylose. Most people spontaneously undo the outcome bythinking, if only the second player had picked black. Wedescribe a computational model that simulates our theoryof the mental representations and cognitive processesunderlying this temporal order effect. The computermodel is corroborated by tests of the novel predictions ofour theory: it should be possible to reverse the temporalorder effect by manipulating the way in which thewinning conditions are described.