ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
What would have happened? Counterfactuals, hypotheticals and causal judgements.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Inference and Imagination.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Review
- Computational basis of hierarchical and counterfactual information processing.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- People reward others based on their willingness to exert effort.Journal of experimental social psychology · 2025Article
- Biomimicry as a decision-making methodology in condition monitoring.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2025Article
- The recursive grammar of mental time travel.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A plausible role of imagination in pretend play, counterfactual reasoning, and executive functions.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2023Article
- Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How do people make causal judgements? In this paper, I show that counterfactual simulations are necessary for explaining causal judgements about events, and that hypotheticals do not suffice. In two experiments, participants viewed video clips of dynamic interactions between billiard balls. In Experiment 1, participants either made hypothetical judgements about whether ball B
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.