The Bidirectional Relation Between Counterfactual Reasoning and Morality in Development

Counterfactual reasoning involves thinking about how past could have been better or worse (e.g., "If only I had booked a taxi, I would have made it to the airport on time."). Substantial evidence has revealed that imagining alternatives to reality influences adults' moral judgments, emotions and behaviours in real world, whereas another relevant line of research has suggested that morality also influences what alternatives to reality people preferentially consider. This thesis examines whether this bidirectional relation between counterfactual reasoning and morality is evident in childhood, and the extent to which the domains of morality and counterfactual reasoning develop in parallel. Chapter 1 introduces the concepts of counterfactual reasoning and morality in human cognition and discusses the existing evidence on how these two concepts influence one another. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's morality while Chapter 4 examines whether morality influences the content of the counterfactual alternatives children consider. In Chapter 2, 236 5- to 8-year-old children first learnt about a character who was exposed to social exclusion and then were asked to imagine how the experience of the target character could have been better or even worse. Children who imagined that the target character's experience could have been worse evaluated social exclusion as more morally acceptable and exhibited lower level empathy-related responses toward the excluded character compared to those who did not imagine worse alternatives. In Chapter 3, 157 5- to-9-year-old children completed a similar counterfactual task and then were additionally asked to engage in two distinct prosocial behaviour activities measuring their resource sharing and social inclusion tendencies. Findings showed that children who imagined how a target character's experience could have been better judged social exclusion as less morally acceptable, shared fewer resources with the character who caused the social exclusion, and exhibited higher effort to include an excluded character in a subsequent unrelated task compared to those who did not imagine better alternatives to reality. In Chapter 4, I examined the effects of moral and statistical norm violations-at both the agent and population level-in children's counterfactual reasoning. Children (n = 297) aged 4- to-11-year-old and adults (n = 118) heard stories in which a norm violating and norm conforming character jointly bring about a negative outcome and then were asked to imagine how the negative outcome could have been avoided. The findings revealed that children's counterfactual reasoning, like adults', is biased to undo the norm violating aspect of reality when constructing counterfactual alternatives. Notably, I found that the effect of moral norm violations is more robust than that of statistical norm violations on counterfactual imagination across development. Chapter 5 discusses theoretical and societal implications of the current experiments and directions for future work. Together, the experiments in this thesis reveal that counterfactual reasoning and morality are intricately linked from early childhood onwards.