Counterfactual curiosity: motivated thinking about what might have been

Abstract

Counterfactual information, information about what might have been, forms the content of counterfactual thoughts and emotions like regret and relief. Recent research suggests that human adults and children, as well as rhesus monkeys, demonstrate ‘counterfactual curiosity’: they are motivated to seek out counterfactual information after making decisions. Based on contemporary theories of curiosity and information seeking and a broad range of empirical literature, we suggest multiple heterogeneous psychological processes that contribute to people's motivation for counterfactual information. This includes processes that are identified in the curiosity literature more generally—the potential use of counterfactual information for adaptive decision making (its long-term instrumental value) and the drive to reduce uncertainty. Additionally, we suggest that counterfactual information may be particularly alluring because of its role in causal reasoning; its relationship with prediction and decision making; and its potential to fulfil emotion regulation and self-serving goals. Some future directions have been suggested, including investigating the role of individual differences in counterfactual curiosity on learning and wellbeing. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny’.

The aesthetic valve: how aesthetic appreciation may switch emotional states from anxiety to curiosity

“…Second, people accepted the gamble, despite not being so much interested in the magic trick, to obtain novel information. The latter may be related to the intrinsic epistemic value of learning something new, a self-rewarding process that further strengthens the information acquisition mechanism [48,49,60,99,100]. To distinguish these two different reasons underlying the acceptance of gambling, we also computed a curiosity index , by dividing the average interest rate elicited by each magic trick block, by the number of accepted gambles in the same block, for each participant and each condition separately ( average interest/no.…”

“…Conversely, curiosity can be conceived as the positive epistemic emotion generated by the perceiver's metacognitive [45] belief that uncertainty conveys the possibility to learn something new from the entropic ambiguous world [44,46,47]. In a sense, curiosity is linked to the expected reward for acquiring new knowledge through exploratory behaviour [23,24,48,49] determined by positive expectations regarding learning progress [50], information gain [51], or slope in the reduction in prediction error [47]. Put otherwise, as long as there is this positive ‘metacognitive evaluation’ [47] or else called ‘promised insight' [52], ‘coping potential’ [13] or ‘expected fluency’ [47,53], ‘uncertainty can be a source of joy and ‘approach’ behaviours, instead of just anxiety’ [47, p. 10].…”

A shared novelty-seeking basis for creativity and curiosity: Response to the commentators

“…This example is akin to contextual novelty in which information is not novel, but is incongruent with the context, and as such, this example does not cover the diverse curiosity spectrum. Along similar lines, Singh & Murayama suggest that while creativity might be driven by novelty, curiosity drives people to seek information that reduces uncertainty (Fitzgibbon & Murayama, 2022; van Lieshout, de Lange, & Cools, 2021), rather than to seek the novel. This, too, explains a specific subset of curiosity-related behaviors which are directed towards the aim of filling an information gap, and does not account for all types of curiosity.…”

Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny

“…As FitzGibbon & Murayama [80] demonstrate, however, learning about counterfactual past possibilities need not be an exclusively mental exercise. The authors discuss recent findings suggesting that both children and adults show 'counterfactual curiosity' about alternative outcomes after making decisions, such that they will actively seek out information about such outcomes when the opportunity to attain them has already passed.…”