Counterfactual Thinking: The temporal order effect. Manuscript in submission

People generate counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think about how things might have happened differently, 'if only… ' and there are considerable regularities in the sorts of past events that people mentally undo. One view is that people rely on the representation of the factual events to construct such a counterfactual alternative. Instead, we suggest that the context of possibilities is crucial, that is, the representation of the set of conditions that determine different outcomes. We describe a computational model that simulates our theory of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying counterfactual thinking. We describe how the model simulates the standard temporal order effect and how it makes novel predictions about the temporal order effect when the context of possibilities is different. 1. COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING Our interest in this paper is in counterfactual thinking, that is, the pervasive tendency for people to mentally construct imaginary alternatives to reality (e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). People readily think counterfactually in real situations by mentally undoing some of the factual events that occurred (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). For example, if I order pasta and it is not good, I ma