Counterfactual thinking is the process of evaluating situations or outcomes by imagining alternatives to the real world and mentally playing out the consequences. There is some debate in the psychological literature as to the relationship between counterfactual thinking and causal beliefs. Some researchers have argued that people often engage in counterfactual thinking to determine causality (Mackie, 1974; Wells & Gavanski, 1989; Lipe, 1991). Yet other research has revealed that counterfactual and causal judgments are not congruent (NÕgbala & Branscombe, 1995; Mandel & Lehman, 1996; Spellman, 2001).
The current study uses nine hypothetical scenarios that vary in the evidence presented. Each subject reads only one version of the scenario, and then is asked to rate the degree to which the scenario supports the truth of a set of counterfactual statements (counterfactual condition) or a set of causal statements (causal condition). The counterfactual and causal statements are matched so that each counterfactual statement expresses the content that, it can be hypothesized, people will spontaneously consider when attempting to judge the corresponding causal statement. If for any scenario the rank order of the ratings of counterfactual statements differs from the rank order of the ratings of causal statements, this is diagnostic of a difference in the reasoning elicited by these two types of statements. If inconsistencies are found, the claim that causality judgment is based on counterfactual judgments is undermined. The psychological research problem then becomes that of understanding why counterfactual and causal judgments diverge.