Counterfactual thinking: The temporal order effect

Human causal induction: A glimpse at the whole picture

“…Studies on causal attribution (see Ahn & Kalish, 2000;Kelley, 1967;Schultz, 1982;White, 1995White, , 2000Wimer & Kelley, 1982, for milestone works on the issue), and counterfactual reasoning (Byrne, 1997;German & Nichols, 2003;Roese, 1994;Walsh & Byrne, 2004) are definitely necessary for understanding how people think about causes and effects. However, our main interest is the psychological and epistemological problem of how causal knowledge is acquired from noncausal previous experience.…”

The relationship between counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to event outcomes: Does one account fit all?

“…However, it is unclear how the theory might be extended to capture the results of Experiment 2. Note here that the mental model account of the temporal order effect (Walsh & Byrne, 2004) is unchallenged by any of our results and is important because it provides a clearly worked-out explanation for the intuitively appealing claim that the most recent in a chain of events will be undone in order to undo a bad outcome.…”

“…The temporal order effect, participants' tendency to undo the last in a chain of events, has been replicated several times (Byrne, Segura, Culhane, Tasso, & Berrocal, 2000;Walsh & Byrne, 2004). It occurs when there are more than two events leading up to the outcome (Segura, FernandezBerrocal, & Byrne, 2002), and when the last event is the first mentioned in the sequence .…”

“…When applied to counterfactual thinking, the model theory explains phenomena such as the action and temporal order effects by recourse to cognitive economy. For example, Walsh and Byrne (2004) have proposed a computational model of the temporal order effect, in which people represent the factual state of affairs and, to reduce the load on working memory, only a subset of the possible counterfactuals. In Miller and Gunasegaram's (1990) scenario, the factual state of affairs is that Jones tossed heads, Cooper tossed tails, and they lost.…”

Examining Moderators of the Hindsight Bias in the Context of Civil Legal Decision-Making: Counterfactuals, Causal Proximity, and Self-Referencing

“…The ideal solution to this problem would be not exposing jurors to any outcome information, but in the context of a civil trial, this is next to impossible. The bifurcation of negligence suits is an option, but as Wexler and Schopp (1989) Mandel & Lehman, 1996;N'gbala & Branscombe, 1995N'gbala & Branscombe, , 1997Roese & Olson, 1995;Spellman & Kincannon, 2001;Walsh & Byrne, 2004).…”