Post Hoc (Experiment 2)

This experiment aims to test whether counterfactual thinking affects participants’ causal and recommendation judgments when they commit the post-hoc fallacy. In Experiment 1, we found that people agreed more with the causal and recommendation statements in the improved condition relative to the unchanged condition. For Experiment 2, we revised all 15 vignettes from the improved condition in Experiment 1 so that they aligned with our planned manipulation. Each participant will view 1 vignette. Then, we will ask them to imagine an alternative to a background condition (background counterfactual condition) or describe what happened in the vignette (control condition). Finally, we will ask them to rate their agreement with a causal and a recommendation statement. We expect to observe lower agreement with causal and recommendation statements when they imagine an alternative to a background condition, as we observed in Pilot Experiment 2.