Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When did something almost happen? In this paper, we in-vestigate what brings counterfactual worlds close. In Exper-iments 1 and 2, we find that participants’ judgments aboutwhether something almost happened are determined by thecausal proximity of the alternative outcome. Something almosthappened, when a small perturbation to the relevant causalevent would have been sufficient to bring it about. In contrastto previous work that has argued that prior expectations areneglected when judging the closeness of counterfactual worlds(Kahneman & Varey, 1990), we show in Experiment 3 thatparticipants are more likely to say something almost happenedwhen they did not expect it. Both prior expectations and causaldistance influence judgments of “almost”. In Experiment 4, weshow how both causal proximity and beliefs about what wouldhave happened in the absence of the cause jointly explain judg-ments of “almost caused” and “almost prevented”.