Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is much diversity in how people form theories and perspectives about situations. There are many instances today in which people may want others to question their perspectives as a first step to changing them. Aspects of counterfactual thinking such as mutability and availability may be involved in questioning a perspective. We explore this in an exploratory study (n = 80) using ambiguous social judgment scenarios. We performed path analysis on the data to compare four models, three of which are based on counterfactual generation. The best fitting model showed that availability was a mediator for mutability to predict our measure of questioning an initial perspective.