This paper has two objectives. First, we will argue that the mutability of conceptual fea- tures can be represented as a single, multiple-valued dimension. We will show that the fea- tures of a concept can be reliably ordered with respect to the degree to which people are willing to transform the feature while retaining the integrity of a representation; i.e., that a number of conceptual tasks, all of which require people to transform conceptual features, produce similar orderings. Following Medin and Shoben (1988), these tasks have in common that they ask people to consider an object that is missing a feature but is otherwise intact (e.g., a real chair without a seat)

ABSTRACT—Decisions are powerfully affected by anticipated regret, and people anticipate feeling more regret when they lose by a narrow margin than when they lose by a wide margin. But research suggests that people are remarkably good at avoiding self-blame, and hence they may be better at avoiding regret than they realize. Four studies measured people’s anticipations and experiences of regret and self-blame. In Study 1, students overestimated how much more regret they would feel when they ‘‘nearly won’ ’ than when they ‘‘clearly lost’ ’ a contest. In Studies 2, 3a, and 3b, subway riders overestimated how much more regret and self-blame they would feel if they ‘‘nearly caught’’ their trains than if they ‘‘clearly missed’ ’ their trains. These results suggest that people are less susceptible to regret than they imagine, and that decision makers who pay to avoid future regrets may be buying emotional insurance that they do not actually need. ‘‘Inside we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life.’’ —Rick to Ilsa, Casablanca (1943) Most of us have been on that runway at one time or another, and, like Ilsa, most of us have boarded the plane. Our most consequential choices—whether to marry, have children, buy a house, enter a profession, or move abroad—are so often made out of fear of regret that students of decision making have focused more attention on this particular combination of disappointment and self-blame than on all

Participants recalled either a negative academic or interpersonal experience, and the relations among counterfactual thinking, negative emotions, and attributions of blame and control were examined. Situational context effects on attribution, counterfactual thinking, and emotion were observed, indicating a greater tendency toward self-focused cognition and emotion in the academic context than in the interpersonal context. Consistent with recent theorising, upward counterfactual thinking was associated with negative emotions of guilt, shame, regret, disappointment, and sadness. However, there was no indication that downward counterfactual thinking regulated emotion as previous literature suggests. Implications for functional and process theories of counterfactual thinking are discussed.

The significance of counterfactual thinking in the causal judgment process has been emphasized for nearly two decades, yet no previous research has directly compared the relative effect of thinking counterfactually versus factually on causal judgment. Three experiments examined this comparison by manipulating the task frame used to focus participants’ thinking about a target event. Prior to making judgments about causality, preventability, blame, and control, participants were directed to think about a target actor either in counterfactual terms (what the actor could have done to change the outcome) or in factual terms (what the actor had done that led to the outcome). In each experiment, the effect of counterfactual thinking did not differ reliably from the effect of factual thinking on causal judgment. Implications for research on causal judgment and mental representation are discussed.

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows. [Sir William Osler] How we evaluate a purchase depends not only on the characteristics of the products we buy but also on the characteristics of products we do not buy. Our satisfaction with a recently purchased car may be lower if we learn that other cars we considered received good evaluations from Car and Driver or Consumer Reports. If we fill up our car’s gas tank for $1.30 per gallon, we may feel upset if we subsequently see gas sold at $1.15 per gallon. We may even be displeased with our purchase of a stock that subsequently increased in value if other stocks we had considered buying increased more. In each of the above examples, we feel regret about the purchase we made. We feel that we made a bad deci-

Abstract not found

Close counterfactuals are alternatives to reality that 'almost happened'. A psychological analysis of close counterfactuals offers insights into the underlying representation of causal episodes and the inherent uncertainty attributed to many causal systems. The perception and representation of causal episodes is organized around possible focal outcomes of the episode, evoking a schema of causal forces competing over time. We introduce a distinction between two kinds of assessments of outcome probability: dispositions, based on causal information available prior to the episode; and propensities, based on event cues obtained from the episode itself. The distinction is critical to the use of 'almost', which requires the attribution of a strong propensity to the counterfactual outcome. The final discussion focuses on characteristic differences between psychological and philosophical approaches to the analysis of counterfactuals, causation and probability.

and the European Association for Decision Making for their help in funding a visit to the

Two experiments establish a rational order effect in responsibility attributions. Experiment 1 shows that in a team challenge in which players contribute sequentially, the last player’s blame or credit for a performance is reduced if the team’s result is already determined prior to his acting. However, credit and blame attributions still vary with quality of performance in these cases. This finding is at odds with Spellman (1997) who proposed that a person’s perceived contribution varies with the degree to which it changes the probability of the eventual outcome. Experiment 2 illustrates that the rational order effect does not overgeneralize to situations in which the experienced order of events does not map onto the objective order of events. The quality of the last person’s performance is only discredited if she knew that the result was already determined.

This is an experimental study of fairness perceptions of different procedures for collective decision-making. Procedures that are equivalent in a materialistic sense are viewed differently by subjects in terms of fairness. More than 60 % of our subjects belong to one of two “types”: “rational ” types who have a materialistic view of procedures, and “emotional ” types who exhibit a systematic fairness ranking of the procedures.