{"pk":29244,"title":"The Effect of Alternative Outcomes on Perceived Counterfactual Closeness","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Assessing the likelihood that a counterfactual event would have happened involves contrasting a factual outcome withthe counterfactual alternative. In many situations, the number of alternatives will influence the perceived closeness of aparticular alternative. For example, losers of a game in which participants guess which door conceals a prize will likelybelieve they were closer to winning when there were three doors compared to six. This reflects accurate probabilisticreasoning because more doors will be associated with a lower probability of winning. However, we test whether thenumber of alternatives has a unique influence on beliefs about counterfactual closeness. Experiments 1 and 2 show that,even when probability is held fixed, people believe counterfactual closeness decreases when there are more alternatives.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/640986kx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Matthew","middle_name":"","last_name":"Myers","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""},{"first_name":"Lance","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rips","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29244/galley/19115/download/"}]}