Why imagining what could have happened matters for children's social cognition

Abstract

In a recent piece on children's imagination and social cognition, Kushnir (2022) highlights an important link between children's ability to imagine alternatives and their emerging social cognition. Kushnir covers work showing how an understanding of physical causation informs children's social cognitive judgments, how children become able to consider what one should do in relation to what one can do, and when children become able to imagine unlikely or conflicting motivations for behaviors. We wholeheartedly agree that children's emerging imaginative abilities have important consequences for their social behaviors and judgments. Here we add to Kushnir's perspective by underscoring the role that counterfactual thinking or imagining what could have happened in the past but did not, has in children's social cognition.As we will outline, a growing body of work shows that children may not think counterfactually until age 6 or even later (

Children use proximity and ability to infer distinct kinds of counterfactual closeness.

“…Previous work on children’s counterfactual reasoning does not allow for strong predictions about how fractionation originates. Much work has examined questions about counterfactuals that do not relate to closeness (for overviews, see Gautam & McAuliffe, 2024; Nyhout & Ganea, 2019a). For example, some work shows that children as young as four understand that an event with two independent causes (i.e., an “overdetermined” event) would still have happened even if one cause had been absent (Nyhout & Ganea, 2019b; also see Kominsky et al, 2021).…”

Calculated Feelings: How Children Use Probability to Infer Emotions

“…That is, information about the probability of outcomes may help children better see the causal relation between people’s actual outcomes, what they could have gotten, and their emotions. Indeed, adults’ probability-based judgments of emotions are typically interpreted in terms of counterfactual reasoning (e.g., Bell, 1985 ; Loomes & Sugden, 1986 ; Mellers et al, 1997 ; Shepperd & McNulty, 2002 ; van Dijk & van der Pligt, 1997 ), and young children are quite adept at reasoning about counterfactuals (e.g., Beck et al, 2006 ; Engle & Walker, 2021 ; German & Nichols, 2003 ; Kominsky et al, 2021 ; Nyhout & Ganea, 2019 ; Wong et al, 2023 ; also see Gautam & McAuliffe, 2023 ; though for findings suggesting later development of counterfactual-based inferences of emotions, see Beck & Crilly, 2009 ; Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004 ; Johnston et al, 2022 ). Further, children with autism can reason counterfactually (e.g., Scott et al, 1999 ) and in some cases, can use it to infer other people’s emotions (e.g., Begeer et al, 2014 ), suggesting a fruitful way for those who struggle with belief attributions to infer people’s emotions.…”