Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Assessing the likelihood that a counterfactual event would have happened involves contrasting a factual outcome withthe counterfactual alternative. In many situations, the number of alternatives will influence the perceived closeness of aparticular alternative. For example, losers of a game in which participants guess which door conceals a prize will likelybelieve they were closer to winning when there were three doors compared to six. This reflects accurate probabilisticreasoning because more doors will be associated with a lower probability of winning. However, we test whether thenumber of alternatives has a unique influence on beliefs about counterfactual closeness. Experiments 1 and 2 show that,even when probability is held fixed, people believe counterfactual closeness decreases when there are more alternatives.