Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws: Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning

Abstract

We report a series of studies of historical reasoning among professional observers of world politics. The correlational studies demonstrate that experts with strong theoretical commitments to a covering law and cognitive-stylistic preferences for explanatory closure are more likely to reject close-call Counterfactual that imply that “already explained” historical outcomes could easily have taken radically different forms. The experimental studies suggest that counterfactual reasoning is not totally theory-driven: Many experts are capable of surprising themselves when encouraged to imagine the implications of particular what-if scenarios. Yet, there is a downside to openness to historical contingency. The more effort experts allocate to exploring counterfactual worlds, the greater is the risk that they will assign too much subjective probability to too many scenarios. We close by defining good judgment as a reflective-equilibrium process of balancing the conflicting causal intuitions primed by complementary factual and counterfactual posings of historical questions.

Spontaneous counterfactual thoughts and causal explanations

“…They may be used as a heuristic for assigning causality (e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 1982;. People sometimes engage in counterfactual thinking in order to determine the causes of outcomes; for example, when they consider historical events (e.g., Tetlock & Lebow, 2001). Counterfactual and causal thoughts can even seem indistinguishable (e.g., Mandel, 2003;Roese, 1997).…”

Balancing Causes and Consequences: The Magnitude-Matching Principle in Explanations for Complex Social Events

“…Indeed, researchers have observed that even welleducated academics in disciplines such as history and political science appear to engage in this form of BALANCING CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 349 reasoning in attempting to disentangle the causes of major historical events (Tetlock & Belkin, 1996). For example, in their work on historical counterfactuals, Tetlock and Lebow (2001) have noted that scholars are often quick to reject possible counterfactuals associated with historical events if they appear to emphasize the importance of causal explanations that seem small or unimportant in comparison to the event itself. For instance, individuals tend to be dismissive of the notion that World War I might have been averted if the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's open-topped car had not made a wrong turn on the streets of Sarajevo (a mistake that subsequently left the duke vulnerable to an assassin's bullet; Tetlock & Lebow, 2001).…”

“…For example, in their work on historical counterfactuals, Tetlock and Lebow (2001) have noted that scholars are often quick to reject possible counterfactuals associated with historical events if they appear to emphasize the importance of causal explanations that seem small or unimportant in comparison to the event itself. For instance, individuals tend to be dismissive of the notion that World War I might have been averted if the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's open-topped car had not made a wrong turn on the streets of Sarajevo (a mistake that subsequently left the duke vulnerable to an assassin's bullet; Tetlock & Lebow, 2001). As noted earlier, laypeople have also speculated that the same tendency may be responsible for the myriad of conspiracy theories surrounding highly impactful events such as the JFK assassination (Crystal, 2003; see also Bethell, 1975).…”

Social institution, cognition, and survival: a cognitive–social simulation

“…4 Similarly, some cognitive attributes (such as a higher learning rate) have universal effects for all social variables (at least in our simulated world), while other attributes (such as probability of using the bottom level) have less universal effects and depend more on social variables (such as strategy). Consequently, the relation between various cognitive parameters and social variables indicates that what social systems, for example, institutions and norms, are adopted may have something to do with cognitive abilities and cognitive tendencies of agents involved (see also Kahan and Rapoport 1984;Conte and Castelfranchi 1995;Tetlock and Lebow 2001;Boyer and Ramble 2001;Atran and Norenzayan 2003;Kluver et al 2005). We may term this relation the social-cognitive dependency.…”