Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To evaluate others’ actions, we consider action outcomes (e.g.,positive or negative) and the actors’ underlying intentions (e.g.,intentional or accidental). However, we often encounter situ-ations where neither actual outcomes nor intentions provideuseful evidence for evaluation but representations of unreal-ized (counterfactual) outcomes matter. Here we ask whetherpreschool-aged children consider counterfactual outcomes toevaluate whose action was more helpful. When two agentseach caught one of two falling apples (one caught it above atrash can and the other above a fruit basket), children chosethe former as the one who should be thanked (because oth-erwise the apple would’ve fallen into the trash). When theagents caught crushed cans, however, children made the op-posite choice, choosing the agent who caught the can over thefruit basket. Even though preschoolers typically struggle withcounterfactuals, children in our task readily engaged in suchreasoning in the context of social evaluation.