Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Experimental Child

Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp

Counterfactual thinking and age differences in

judgments of regret and blame
Ayse Payir a,⇑, Robert Guttentag b
a
Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA
b
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In the current study, we examined whether two different counter-
Received 17 April 2018 factual thinking biases (i.e., action bias and temporal order bias)
Revised 2 January 2019 influence children’s and adults’ judgments of regret and blame
and whether the perspective that participants take (i.e., self vs.
other) affects blame attributions. Little evidence was found for
Keywords:
either bias in young children’s judgments, and at older ages the
Development of counterfactual thinking
Children’s judgments of regret temporal order bias had a stronger influence on judgments com-
Children’s judgments of blame pared with the action bias. In addition, the results provide new evi-
Omission bias dence suggesting that there are developmental changes in the
Temporal order effect effects of self versus other perspectives on children’s social judg-
ments. The findings are discussed in the context of developmental
change in counterfactual thinking.
Ó 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

It’s quite common for adults to reflect on ways in which events they have experienced might have
turned out differently under somewhat different circumstances, a phenomenon termed counterfactual
thinking (Byrne, 2016; Roese, 1997). Counterfactual thinking affects several aspects of cognition,
including decision making (O’Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, 2014; Zeelenberg, 1999), evaluations
of cause and effect relationships (Gavanski & Wells, 1989; Harris, German, & Mills, 1996;
Spellman & Kincannon, 2001), and how we make sense of life events (Payir & Guttentag, 2016;
Teigen & Jensen, 2010). It also has a significant impact on our emotion and social judgments

⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: aysep@bu.edu (A. Payir).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.02.007
0022-0965/Ó 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
262 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

(Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Pizarro, Uhlmann, & Salovey, 2003; Roese, 2008; Wells, Tayler, & Turtle,
1987). In the current study, we focused on developmental change in two, possibly related types of
such judgments: judgments of regret and judgments of blame.
Regret is experienced in situations where we reflect on the likelihood that an unpleasant experience
could have been avoided if a different course of action had been followed (e.g., Zeelenberg & Pieters,
2004, 2007). Importantly, regret has a profound effect on decision making. For example, the amount
of regret caused by unchosen alternatives significantly changes future preferences (e.g., Ma & Roese,
2014), whereas the anticipation of regret leads to less risky behavioral choices (Richard, van der
Pligt, & De Vries, 1996). Even children as young as 7 years have been found to alter a behavior choice
after realizing that an alternative action could have resulted in a better outcome (O’Connor et al., 2014).
Whether an unpleasant outcome could have been avoided affects ascriptions of blame as well (Alicke,
Buckingham, Zell, & Davis, 2008; Gavanski & Wells, 1989). It has been found, for example, that if a readily
available counterfactual alternative would have led to a better outcome, there is an increase in attribu-
tions of blame and corresponding increases in judgments of appropriate compensation for victims and
the severity of recommended punishments for perpetrators (Goldinger, Kleider, Azuma, & Beike, 2003).
Counterfactual thinking is a relatively complex form of cognition involving two mental represen-
tations: a representation of the known reality and a representation of an imagined alternative (a
mutated version of the known reality). The more easily a representation of reality gives rise to an
alternative outcome that is better than what actually occurred, the greater an adult’s experience of
regret tends to be and the greater ascriptions of blame tend to be (Byrne, 2016, 2017; Kahneman &
Miller, 1986; Roese, 1997). For example, norm violations have been found to lead to easier mutations
of reality; when events deviate from norms, people tend to create counterfactuals in which these
events are brought back to their normal states (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). The generation of such
counterfactuals then contributes to judgments of the likelihood that an individual will be blamed
for engaging in an action related to the occurrence of a negative outcome (Hitchcock & Knobe,
2009; Kominsky, Philips, Gerstenberg, Lagnado, & Knobe, 2015). This tendency for some contexts to
be more likely than others to give rise to counterfactual thinking produces a set of biases (or ‘‘fault
lines,” as termed by Byrne, 2016, 2017). In the current study, we studied how counterfactual thinking
affects children’s judgments of regret and blame, focusing on two of these biases: action bias (also
referred to as omission bias) and temporal order bias.
Action bias refers to the finding that people are more likely to generate counterfactuals by mutat-
ing actions rather than inactions (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; see also Gleicher et al., 1990; Landman,
1987). In the classic demonstration of this effect, Kahneman and Tversky (1982) presented partici-
pants with a story in which two businessmen make a decision about changing their ownership of
stocks in two different companies. One businessman owns stock in Company B but decides to switch
his stock to Company A, whereas the other businessman, who owns stock in Company A, considers
switching his stock ownership to Company B but then decides not to make the change. Both business-
men eventually find out that they would have been better off if they had owned stock in Company B
rather than Company A. Even though both businessmen end up in the same situation, the one who
took the action of selling stock in Company B in order to buy stock in Company A is judged to be more
regretful than the one who considered switching but did not.
Action bias has been found to influence some practical decisions (Byrne, 2016). For instance,
Sugarman (1986) found that people attribute greater responsibility to a physician, and judge his con-
duct as more unethical, when he was involved in active euthanasia (e.g., bringing death by a lethal injec-
tion) versus passive euthanasia (i.e., letting the patient die). Similarly, it was found that participants
favored withholding vaccination even when the outcomes of no vaccination were described as worse
than the outcomes of being vaccinated (Ritov & Baron, 1990), because they gave excessive weighting
to the possibility that doing something (in this case vaccinating) could lead to a harmful outcome.
Temporal order bias refers to the finding that when people create counterfactuals for a series of
independent events, they tend to mutate the later event rather than the earlier event (Kahneman &
Miller, 1986; Miller & Gunasegaram, 1990). For instance, when provided with a scenario in which
two players can win a monetary reward if both pick the same color card from a shuffled deck of cards,
but the players lose, adults who are asked to reflect on how the outcome could have been different
exhibit a strong tendency to change the second player’s card selection rather than that of the first
 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275 263

player. They also judge that the second player would feel worse and would be blamed more than the
first player for not winning the game (Byrne, Segura, Culhane, Tasso, & Berrocal, 2000).
Developmentally, the simplest forms of counterfactual thinking have been found to emerge during
the late preschool years (e.g., Harris et al., 1996). However, the ability to think counterfactually con-
tinues to be refined throughout childhood (e.g., Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010; Rafetseder,
Schwitalla, & Perner, 2013). In particular, it has been found that the ability to use counterfactual think-
ing in the service of making other forms of judgments (e.g., judgments about others’ likely emotional
responses in different situations, judgments about blame, and judgments about methods for consoling
others) tends to lag the ability to engage in counterfactual thinking itself (Guttentag & Ferrell, 2008;
Meehan & Byrne, 2005; O’Connor et al., 2014; Payir & Guttentag, 2016). Thus, for example, Guttentag
and Ferrell (2008) found that even though 5- and 6-year-olds are capable of thinking counterfactually,
it was not until 7 or 8 years of age that children exhibited an understanding of regret, whereas even 9-
and 10-year-olds exhibited very limited understanding of regret anticipation. Similarly, although chil-
dren can experience relief at around 8 years of age (under conditions where a salient counterfactual
alternative would have been worse than what really occurred; Weisberg & Beck, 2010), even 12-
year-olds have been found to be less likely than adults to use an understanding of relief as the basis
for the consoling of others (Payir & Guttentag, 2016).
Beck and colleagues (Beck & Riggs, 2014; Beck, Weisberg, Burns, & Riggs, 2014) have recently
argued that gaining a fuller understanding of how counterfactual thinking is refined throughout child-
hood requires an understanding of the degree to which children’s counterfactual reasoning is suscep-
tible to the biases that are commonly observed in adults’ counterfactual thinking. Currently, very little
is known about patterns of emergence of the different counterfactual thinking biases and whether the
pattern is the same for different kinds of judgments, although a couple of studies have focused on the
biases being investigated here. In two experiments, Guttentag and Ferrell (2004) found that it was not
until 7 years of age that children’s judgments of regret exhibited evidence of the action bias, whereas
in a study that investigated the temporal order effect, Meehan and Byrne (2005) found that both 6-
and 8-year-olds picked the second player more often than the first player when asked who feels
worse. However, in Meehan and Byrne’s study, it was only 8-year-olds who also judged that the sec-
ond player would be blamed more by the first player, suggesting some degree of dissociation between
developmental patterns of judgments for regret and blame.
The study by Meehan and Byrne (2005) represents the sole study to date that has examined judg-
ments of emotions and attributions of blame with the same counterfactual thinking scenario, and that
study examined those two kinds of judgments in the context of just a single counterfactual thinking
bias (i.e., the temporal order bias). One purpose of the current study, therefore, was to test for the
emergence of two different counterfactual thinking biases (temporal order bias and action bias) in
children’s judgments of both regret and blame. An additional limitation of Meehan and Byrne
(2005) study is that it did not include participants older than 8 years and, thus, did not test for the
possibility that the strength of the temporal order bias may differ between the time of its initial emer-
gence at 8 years and adulthood. Accordingly, the current study included child participants older than
8 years and adults.
Participants in the current study, ranging in age from 6 years through adulthood, were presented
with parallel temporal order bias and action bias scenarios and were asked to make judgments of both
regret and blame, thereby allowing us to assess whether the two kinds of counterfactual thinking
biases emerge at the same age and whether these two forms of judgments (regret and blame) are
affected by event mutability factors in similar ways across age.
As discussed above, although in the current literature these two biases are described as reflecting
the same underlying mechanism, it is unknown whether the two emerge at the same age. A compar-
ison of the Meehan and Byrne (2005) and Guttentag and Ferrell (2004) studies suggests that the tem-
poral order effect may emerge prior to the action bias; however, both the exact ages of the participants
studied and the nature of the scenarios used were different in these two studies, making a direct com-
parison of their findings problematic for these purposes. In general, if the emergence of all counterfac-
tual thinking biases depends on the same underlying counterfactual thinking ability, one would
anticipate a simultaneous developmental emergence of all counterfactual thinking biases. Alterna-
tively, it may be the case that the contextual factors that are key to producing different counterfactual
264 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

thinking biases may differ in the degree to which they are likely to prompt counterfactual thinking
(Ferrell, Guttentag, & Gredlein, 2009), perhaps by affecting the ease with which the reality and the
counterfactual are represented. If this is the case, then one would expect an earlier developmental
emergence of some biases compared with others. Similarly, although Meehan and Byrne (2005) found
that the temporal order bias emerged at an earlier age in the context of judgments of regret than in the
context of judgments of blame, it is not known whether a similar pattern occurs for other counterfac-
tual thinking biases.
The current study also extends previous findings by examining the way in which the self versus
other perspective (taken by those making a blame judgment) might affect assessments of blame. Pre-
vious research has found that the role adults take can affect important elements of their counterfac-
tual thinking (Girotto, Ferrante, Pighin, & Gonzalez, 2007). Specifically, Girotto et al. (2007) found that
when adults are asked to adopt the perspective of the protagonist within a situation, they mutate the
protagonist’s choice to undo a negative outcome. In contrast, when adults are made the protagonist of
the same negative event themselves, they are more likely to mutate the situational factors to undo the
negative outcome. In addition to these findings, in their review of the studies focusing on the asym-
metry between the self and other perception, Pronin, Gilovich, and Ross (2004) found that people have
a tendency to see others as more susceptible to several motivational and cognitive biases than they are
themselves, suggesting that blame judgments following a counterfactual assessment of a negative
outcome may diverge depending on the perspective that participants adopt.
Accordingly, in the current study, we also conducted an initial examination of the effects of self ver-
sus other perspective in the context of counterfactual thinking and judgments of blame. Previously,
Weisberg and Beck (2010) found a developmental gap between children’s own experience of regret
and relief versus their understanding of others’ regret and relief; to our knowledge, the current study
is the first to examine whether the effects of such differences in perspective affect children’s and
adults’ judgments of blame in similar ways.
The participants in the current study were presented with two negative outcome scenarios (one
involving temporal order bias and the other involving action bias). In each scenario, two students play
a game to win a prize for themselves and their classmates. The students in the scenarios need to make
a choice between two options, but they ultimately make the wrong choice and lose the game. Partic-
ipants in the study made judgments of regret and two forms of blame judgments related to the pro-
tagonists in the scenarios: others’ blame, which involved judgments regarding the relative degree to
which the target characters would be blamed by other students in the class for the fact that no one
in class won a prize, and self-rated blame, which involved participants making judgments regarding
their own assessment of the relative degree to which the target characters should be blamed for
the negative outcome of the game.
Although there is no consensus on exactly when counterfactual thinking and related processes
emerge, previous findings clearly demonstrate that some counterfactual thinking-related forms of
thinking continue to develop at least into middle childhood (see Beck & Riggs, 2014; Beck et al.,
2014; Byrne, 2016, for reviews). Accordingly, for our child participants, we preferred an age range that
would capture this time frame and we included adult participants to observe the differences between
adults’ and children’s counterfactual thinking. Based on the initial findings about the emergence of
action and temporal order biases discussed above (Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004, 2008; Meehan &
Byrne, 2005), the most straightforward prediction was that dramatic age differences would be found
for judgments of regret and for judgments of blame by others for both biases between 6 and 8 years of
age. Currently, there is no evidence to suggest any differences between 8- and 11-year-olds regarding
action and temporal order biases, because the studies that focused on these biases did not include chil-
dren older than 8 or 9 years (Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004; Meehan & Byrne, 2005). However, based on the
previous findings that suggest differences between 8-year-olds and older children in terms of their
ability to use counterfactual thinking in the service of some other judgments (Guttentag & Ferrell,
2008; Payir & Guttentag, 2016), it is reasonable to predict differences between 8-year-olds and adults;
the inclusion of 11-year olds, therefore, may provide insight into the age at which fully adult-like pat-
terns of judgments emerge.
Regarding the comparison of self versus other perspectives when making blame judgments, as was
noted above, previous findings suggest that the perspective adults take affects which aspects of reality
 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275 265

they take into account when generating counterfactuals (Girotto et al., 2007) and that adults view
others as more susceptible to several cognitive and motivational biases (Pronin et al., 2004). Therefore,
one possibility is that adults’ judgments will be more likely to be influenced by mutability when they
take others’ perspective than when they take their own perspective. In other words, in the case of
adults, others’ blame judgments will be influenced more by counterfactual thinking biases than
self-rated blame judgments will be. Because no previous study has compared children’s responses
across the kinds of blame judgments examined here, it was difficult to make clear predictions regard-
ing patterns of responses by children; accordingly, the current study represents an initial attempt to
examine whether children will show such a dissociation between the two kinds of blame judgments.

Method

Participants

Based on Cohen (1992) guidelines and previous developmental studies about counterfactual think-
ing (e.g., O’Connor et al., 2014; Payir & Guttentag, 2016), we determined that a total sample size of
N = 121 or more would be adequate to detect a medium size effect at a = .05. The child participants
were 18 6-year-olds (M = 6.62 years, SD = 0.42, range = 6.03–6.92; 8 girls), 20 8-year-olds
(M = 8.44 years, SD = 0.34, range = 8.00–8.99; 10 girls), and 19 11-year-olds (M = 11.48 years,
SD = 0.34, range = 11.00–11.95; 14 girls). They were recruited from a private school in the southern
United States, were predominantly White, and had middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds. The
adult participants were 72 undergraduate students (50 women) from the southern United States
who participated for course credit. Although we did not collect any information from the adults regard-
ing ethnicity, a breakdown of ethnicity for an introductory class in the college where the data were col-
lected is as follows: Black (including mixed Black and White) 43%, White 40%, Hispanic (including Black
Hispanic) 11%, and other (Native American, Asian, or Arab) 6%. All participants were tested in English.

Materials

The Appendix contains the two stories and task questions that were used in the study. In each of
these stories, two students play a game where they make a choice between two options to win a prize
for themselves and their classmates. In all cases, the outcome is that the characters’ decisions result in
a failure to win the prize. In the action/inaction story, the target character switches from one choice to
the other and the other character does not. In the temporal order story, the nontarget character makes
his choice first and the target character makes his choice second.
After each story, the participants were asked to judge (a) whether one character would feel worse
than the other about their respective choices or whether the two characters would feel equally bad
(regret question), (b) whether the classmates of the characters would blame one character more than
the other or whether they would blame the characters equally (others’ blame question), and (c)
whether one character deserves more blame than the other or whether they deserve equal blame
(self-rated blame question). To have a better understanding of the reasoning process behind the
choices participants made and to ensure that these choices were not made randomly, participants
were also asked to justify their responses.
With children, the experimenter used puppets, boxes, and cards to act out the stories. The puppets
were designed in a way that did not depict the emotional reactions of the characters. To include both
genders in the stories, the characters in the action/inaction story were female, whereas the characters
in the temporal order story were male. The names of the characters were clearly written on the pup-
pets. For adult participants, packages including the printed stories and questions were prepared.

Procedure

All participants received the two stories and their accompanying questions as described above. The
ordering of the story type (action/inaction vs. temporal order) was counterbalanced across
266 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

participants at each age, and all participants received the task questions in the same order for both sto-
ries: first the regret question, then the others’ blame question, and finally the self-rated blame question.
The task procedure was adjusted slightly to meet the response ability of different age groups, as
was done in similar studies (e.g., Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004). Adults received booklets that contained
the two stories. Each story was printed on a separate page with its accompanying questions. After each
story, adults were reminded about the key elements of the story before being presented with the ques-
tions, and at the end of each question space was provided for them to write their answer. They com-
pleted the study in a single setting as one group in their classroom.
The 6- and 8-year-olds were tested individually in a quiet room in their school. The experimenter
told the stories using puppets to depict the flow of the events. After each story, the experimenter
reminded children about the key elements of the story by asking comprehension questions (e.g.,
‘‘So, Amy picked which box?”), and any wrong answers were corrected at this time. Children answered
the task questions in any way they desired (e.g., by pointing, by calling out a name, by using the pup-
pets). A slightly different procedure was used with 11-year-olds, who were tested in groups of 2 to 4 in
a quiet room in their school. They were provided with the booklets that adults received and were
instructed to listen to the experimenter as she told the stories using the puppets. After reminding
the children about the key elements of the story, the experimenter asked each task question in the
order described above. After each question, the experimenter waited for all children to write their
response before posing the next question.
This study was approved by the human subjects institutional review board at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro (Protocol No. 15-0208; ‘‘Age differences in judgments of blame and credit”).

Results

Table 1 presents the percentage of participants at each age providing each type of response—target,
nontarget, and equal—in each story for the judgments of regret, others’ blame, and self-rated blame. In
the action/inaction story, the target character was the one whose choice was framed as action; in the
temporal order story, the target character was the one who made his decision second.
There was no significant effect of participant gender or order of story presentation on participants’
judgments of regret (p = .65 for the effect of gender and p = .82 for the effect of order), others’ blame
(p = .65 for the effect of gender and p = .87 for the effect of order), or self-rated blame (p = .77 for gen-
der and p = .55 for the effect of order). Accordingly, these two variables were not included in any of the
analyses described below.

Differences between the action/inaction and temporal order stories

Because the primary measure of the presence or absence of a bias in participants’ judgments was
the percentage of ‘‘target” responses, the ‘‘equal” and ‘‘nontarget” categories were combined into a
single category for these analyses. To test whether the two counterfactual thinking biases have differ-
ent developmental patterns, three McNemar tests were run to compare the judgments of regret,
others’ blame, and self-rated blame across the action/inaction and temporal order stories. The judg-
ments of regret and self-rated blame did not differ significantly across the stories (p > .10); however,
there was a significantly larger temporal order bias effect than action bias effect on judgments of
others’ blame (p = .02). Therefore, we analyzed the age differences in judgments of regret and blame
separately for each story. To control for the Type I error rate for all pairwise comparisons among the
different age groups (a total of six comparisons), we used sequential Bonferroni correction, which
yielded the following adjusted p values: .008, .01, .013, .016, .025, and .05.

Age differences in judgments of regret and blame

Action/inaction story
A 2  4 chi-square analysis was conducted for judgments of regret, judgments of others’ blame,
and judgments of self-rated blame. There was a significant age difference for judgments of regret,
 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275 267

Table 1
Percentage of participants at each age who made each type of judgment for each story.

Story and judgment type 6-year-olds 8-year-olds 11-year-olds Adults

Action/inaction
Regret (%)
Target 17 40 58 85
Nontarget 28 10 0 0
Equal 56 50 42 15
Others’ blame (%)
Target 6 20 42 74
Nontarget 17 5 21 3
Equal 78 75 37 24
Self-rated blame (%)
Target 28 15 10 24
Nontarget 6 5 0 0
Equal 67 80 90 73
Temporal order
Regret (%)
Target 33 50 63 75
Nontarget 6 10 0 1
Equal 61 40 37 24
Others’ blame (%)
Target 33 55 68 76
Nontarget 22 0 0 0
Equal 44 45 32 24
Self-rated blame (%)
Target 17 25 26 8
Nontarget 6 0 0 1
Equal 77 80 74 91

v2(3, N = 129) = 36.38, p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.53. Paired comparisons with sequential Bonferroni cor-
rection revealed the following results. First, 6-, 8-, and 11-year-olds were less likely than adults to
think that the target character would feel worse (p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.60, p < .001, Cramer’s
V = 0.43, and p = .01, Cramer’s V = 0.27, respectively). Second, 6-year-olds were less likely than 11-
year-olds to conclude that the target character would feel worse (p = .01, Cramer’s V = 0.43). Results
from the remaining comparisons were not significant.
The judgments of others’ blame revealed a similar pattern of responses. There was a significant age
difference, v2(3, N = 129) = 37.90, p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.54, and paired comparisons with sequential
Bonferroni correction yielded the following results. First, 6-, 8-, and 11-year-olds were less likely than
adults to think that the target character would be blamed more (p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.56, p < .001,
Cramer’s V = 0.46, and p = .009, Cramer’s V = 0.27, respectively). Second, 6-year-olds were less likely
than 11-year-olds to conclude that the target character would be blamed more (p = .01, Cramer’s
V = 0.43). Results from the remaining comparisons were not significant. In marked contrast to the
analyses of regret and others’ blame, a chi-square analysis for the judgments of self-rated blame
did not reveal any significant age differences in patterns of responding, v2(3, N = 129) = 2.49, p = .48.
To detect whether there is an asymmetry between self and others’ attributions of blame, we com-
pared participants’ judgments of others’ blame with their judgments of self-rated blame using a
McNemar test. The results revealed that judgments of self-rated blame led to significantly fewer target
responses compared with judgments of others’ blame (p < .001). Paired tests with sequential Bonfer-
roni correction revealed a significant difference between the two forms of blame judgments for adults
(p < .001), but not for 11-year-olds (p = .07), 8-year-olds (p = .10), or 6-year-olds (p = .22).

Temporal order story

As was the case with the analysis of the action/inaction story, we conducted a 2  4 chi-square
analysis for the judgments of regret, others’ blame, and self-rated blame. We found a significant age
difference for judgments of regret, v2(1, N = 129) = 12.76, p = .005, Cramer’s V = 0.31, and paired com-
parisons with sequential Bonferroni correction demonstrated that 6-year-olds were less likely than
268 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

adults to judge that the target character would feel worse (p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.35). Results from
the remaining comparisons were not significant.
The pattern of others’ blame judgments resembled the judgments of regret. There was an overall
significant age difference, v2(3, N = 129) = 13.13, p = .004, Cramer’s V = 0.32, and paired comparisons
with sequential Bonferroni correction yielded that 6-year-olds were less likely than adults to conclude
that the target character would be blamed more (p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.37). Results from the
remaining comparisons were not significant. As was found with responses to the action/inaction story,
there were no significant age differences in patterns of response for the judgments of self-rated blame,
v2(3, N = 129) = 6.11, p = .11.
To detect whether there is an asymmetry between self and others’ attributions of blame, we com-
pared participants’ judgments of others’ blame with their judgments of self-rated blame using a
McNemar test. The results revealed that judgments of self-rated blame led to significantly fewer target
responses compared with judgments of others’ blame, (p < .001). Paired tests with sequential Bonfer-
roni correction revealed a significant difference between the two forms of blame judgments for adults
(p < .001) and 11-year-olds (p = .008), but not for 8-year-olds (p = .03) or 6-year-olds (p = .38).

Explanations

The explanations provided by participants who selected the target or nontarget character in
response to each question were classified into one of three categories: (a) alternative/choice (the expla-
nation involves a reference to the alternative outcome or the choice of the character; e.g., ‘‘Barb would
feel worse because she picked the right box at the beginning but then she switched,” ‘‘Rob would be
blamed more/deserves more blame because they could have won if he had picked the other card”), (b)
other (the explanation involves some element of the story or something that is made up by the par-
ticipant; e.g., ‘‘Barb would feel worse because her parents are poor and they needed the money,”
‘‘Their friends really wanted them to win”), or (c) no explanation.
The explanations provided by participants who thought that the two characters would feel the
same and would be blamed equally were also divided into one of three categories: (a) same outcome
(the explanation involves a reference to the fact that both characters experienced the same outcome;
e.g., ‘‘They would feel equally bad because they both lost,” ‘‘They both lost for everyone”), (b) alterna-
tive/choice (the explanation involves a reference to the alternative outcome or the choices of the char-
acters; e.g., ‘‘One switched and the other did not,” ‘‘If they had picked the same card, they could have
won”), or (c) no explanation.
Although the above categories were sufficient for the ‘‘same” explanations that were provided to
regret and others’ blame questions, an initial inspection of the explanations that were provided to jus-
tify ‘‘same” responses to the self-rated blame question indicated that this question elicited somewhat
different kinds of explanations. Accordingly, self-rated blame explanations were grouped into one of
the following four categories: (a) same outcome (the explanation involves a reference to the fact that
both characters experienced the same outcome; e.g., ‘‘They both made wrong choices”, "They both did
the same thing; they did not get it right"), (b) chance/probability (the explanation involves a reference
to the fact that it is a game of chance or that the odds were the same for both characters; e.g., ‘‘It was a
50/50 chance for both,” ‘‘They were equally likely to win”), (c) social conventions (the explanation
involves a reference to social rules of fairness or niceness; e.g., ‘‘It would not be fair to blame one more
than the other,” ‘‘The other would feel sad if he is blamed more”), or (d) no explanation.
A second coder who was blind to the hypotheses coded 36 randomly selected explanations after
receiving training for the coding system. The agreement between the first and second coders was high
(Cohen’s j = 0.84). Because the number of explanations in some categories was small, for the following
statistical analyses the explanations were collapsed across the action/inaction and temporal order sto-
ries. Table 2 represents the explanations provided for each response type (target, nontarget, or equal)
at each age.

Judgments of regret
All participants who thought that the target character would feel worse justified their response
with a reference to the alternative outcome or the choice of the character with the exception of 1
 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275 269

Table 2
Number of explanations of each type for emotion and blame judgments at each age.

Judgment/Response/Explanation Age
6-year-olds 8-year-olds 11-year-olds Adults
Regret
Target character n=9 n = 18 n = 23 n = 115
Alternative outcome 9 17 23 114
Other 0 1 0 0
No explanation 0 0 0 1
Nontarget character n=6 n=4 n=0 n=1
Alternative outcome 6 3 0 1
Other 0 1 0 0
No explanation 0 0 0 0
Equal n = 21 n = 18 n = 15 n = 28
Same outcome 16 16 14 27
Choices 1 1 1 1
No explanation 4 1 0 0
Others’ blame
Target character n=7 n = 15 n = 21 n = 108
Alternative outcome 6 14 20 108
Other 0 1 1 0
No explanation 1 0 0 0
Nontarget character n=7 n=1 n=4 n=2
Alternative outcome 6 1 4 2
Other 0 0 0 0
No explanation 1 0 0 0
Equal n = 22 n = 24 n = 13 n = 34
Same outcome 13 21 11 30
Choices 1 0 2 4
No explanation 8 3 0 0
Self-rated blame
Target character n=8 n=7 n=7 n = 23
Alternative outcome 6 6 7 22
Other 0 0 0 1
No explanation 2 1 0 0
Nontarget character n=2 n=1 n=0 n=1
Alternative outcome 2 1 0 1
Other 0 0 0 0
No explanation 0 0 0 0
Equal n = 26 n = 32 n = 31 n = 120
Same outcome 13 18 11 48
Chance/probability 0 1 8 54
Social conventions 4 9 11 17
No explanation 9 4 1 1

8-year-old. When the nontarget character was picked, again, making a reference to the alternative
outcome or the choice of the character was the most common explanation.
When the judgment was ‘‘equally bad,” the majority of participants made a reference to the fact
that both characters experienced the same outcome, whereas some 6-year-olds (19%, 4 of 21
instances) did not provide any explanation.

Judgments of others’ blame

When participants judged that the target character would be blamed more than the nontarget
character by their classmates, participants almost always justified their response by making a refer-
ence to the alternative outcome or the choice of the target character. When the nontarget character
was chosen as a response, again, a reference was made to the alternative outcome or the choice of
the character most of the time.
When participants judged that both characters would be blamed equally, the most common expla-
nation was a reference to the fact that the outcome was the same for both characters.
270 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

Judgments of self-rated blame

Nearly all participants who picked the target character justified their response with a reference to
the alternative outcome or the choice of the character. Only 3 participants (2 6-year-olds and 1 8-year-
old) concluded that the nontarget character deserved more blame. The explanation for this response
always involved a reference to the alternative outcome or the choice of the target character.
In contrast, there were large age differences in the pattern of explanations of equal self-rated
blame. In particular, it was only for adults and 11-year-olds that reference was commonly made to
the probabilistic nature of the game.
A 4 (Age)  4 (Explanation) chi-square test revealed that there was a significant age difference for
the explanations of equal self-rated blame, v2(4, N = 209) = 69.98, p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.33. Paired
comparisons with sequential Bonferroni correction revealed that 6-year-olds differed from adults
(p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.57) and 11-year-olds (p = .001, Cramer’s V = 0.57) and that 8-year-olds dif-
fered from adults (p < .001, Cramer’s V = 0.42).

Discussion

The primary goal of the current study was to examine how two different counterfactual thinking
biases (action bias and temporal order bias) influence children’s judgments of regret and blame—
two types of judgments that are heavily influenced by counterfactual thinking. More specifically, using
scenarios based on these two common biases observed in adults’ counterfactual thinking, we asked
adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 11 years) to judge which one of two characters in two
stories would feel worse, would be blamed more by others, and deserved more blame.
Focusing first on the judgments of regret and others’ blame, the pattern of responses by adults was
essentially as predicted. A significant majority of adults judged that the target character in each sce-
nario was likely to feel more regret and was likely to be blamed more, and these adults virtually
always justified such judgments by making reference to the potentially better alternative outcome
for the target character. The judgments of 11-year-olds closely matched the pattern of responses by
adults, although a somewhat smaller percentage of 11-year-olds selected the target character for
the action/inaction story than was the case for adults. In contrast, the pattern of responses by 6-
year-olds differed rather dramatically from the pattern found with adults and 11-year-olds. Specifi-
cally, 6-year-olds were much less likely than adults and 11-year-olds to select the target character
when making judgments of regret and others’ blame. The responses of 8-year-olds are somewhat dif-
ficult to characterize in any simple way except to note that their numbers tended to fall in between
those of the younger children and the older children and adults. Indeed, it is worth noting that even
11-year-olds were less likely than adults (but more likely than 6-year-olds) to select the target char-
acter with the action/inaction story, suggesting that proneness toward incorporating counterfactual
thinking into one’s judgments of regret and blame may continue to develop throughout childhood.
These findings are generally consistent with previous research, which has demonstrated that
although children can engage in counterfactual thinking in some contexts as early as 4 years of age
(German & Nichols, 2003; Harris et al., 1996), they do not seem to apply counterfactual thinking to
help with their understanding of emotions at this age (Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004) and their counter-
factual thinking is refined throughout childhood (McCormack, Ho, Gribben, O’Connor, & Hoerl,
2018; Nyhout, Henke, & Ganea, 2017). More importantly, the current findings extend previous
research by showing that 6-year-olds’ blame judgments do not seem to be affected by counterfactual
thinking or, at least, that the same factors known to affect counterfactual thinking in adults do not
consistently affect 6-year-olds’ judgments of blame.
In looking across the regret and others’ blame judgments, the most noteworthy feature of the find-
ings is the similarity of the patterns of developmental change for these judgments. One possible inter-
pretation of this finding is that because both kinds of judgments are subject to the influence of
counterfactual thinking, one would expect parallel patterns of developmental change for both. Alter-
natively, it may be the case that judgments of regret mediated judgments of blame. According to this
view, participants made their others’ blame judgments by first assessing the likely strength of the neg-
ative emotional responses that would be felt by the other students when the reward was not won and
 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275 271

then judging that the more negative the emotional responses of the other students, the more strongly
the other students would blame the target character. Essentially, this argument proposes that partic-
ipants assumed that the other students in each class would base their assignments of blame on the
intensity of their own disappointment—a view consistent with evidence regarding the important role
that emotional responses play in moral judgments (Danovitch & Keil, 2008; Greene, Sommerville,
Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001).
One additional purpose of the current study was to examine whether similar patterns of develop-
mental change in judgments of regret and blame would be found for the scenarios that were based on
the two different counterfactual thinking biases tested here. When looking at response patterns across
the two scenarios, we found that age differences were less pronounced for the temporal order story
than for the action/inaction story, suggesting that temporal order bias may serve as a stronger prompt
for children’s counterfactual thinking than action bias. These results not only support the earlier find-
ings that biases in counterfactual thinking do not necessarily emerge together with the ability to think
counterfactually (Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004; Meehan & Byrne, 2005), but they also extend previous
findings by demonstrating that some biases may emerge earlier than others.
The current findings are essentially agnostic with regard to the reason why the temporal order bias
manifested itself more strongly than the action bias. The contexts that produce the temporal order
effect and the contexts that produce the action effect differ in a number of ways that could be respon-
sible for the difference we observed. For instance, with the temporal order scenario, there is a single
outcome that is determined by a choice from each player, but the choice of the second player is tem-
porally closer to the outcome than the choice of the first player and the first player’s choice serves as a
standard against which the second player’s choice is evaluated (Meehan & Byrne, 2005). Accordingly,
when considering counterfactual alternatives, more attention is likely to be focused on the action of
the second player than on that of the first player. In contrast, in the case of the action/inaction scenar-
io, the distance between each character’s decision and the outcome was the same for both characters,
which may make the structure of the action/inaction scenario a less powerful stimulator of counter-
factual thinking than is the case with temporal order scenario. Further research focusing on what gives
rise to different counterfactual biases is required, however, to fully understand the difference observed
between these two scenarios.
In addition to making judgments of others’ blame, participants in the current study also rated the
relative degree to which they themselves thought the characters should be blamed. For adults and 11-
year-olds, the judgments of others’ blame versus self-rated blame were dramatically different; at both
ages, participants themselves were much more likely to attribute equal blame to the two characters,
whereas they thought that others would blame the target character more. Thus, at these two ages, par-
ticipants tended to judge that others would be subject to counterfactual thinking biases when they
make judgments of blame, whereas participants judged themselves as much less affected by these
biases. This differentiation between self-rated blame and others’ blame was not evident in 6- and
8-year-olds’ judgments.
It must be acknowledged that because all participants received the self-rated blame question after
answering the others’ blame question, we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that these age dif-
ferences reflect an age difference in the effects of question ordering on participants’ responses. We
consider the ‘‘order of questions” explanation to be an unlikely one, however, in part because the
age difference in responses was paralleled by age differences in explanations and in part because there
is no a priori reason to suspect such a dramatic age difference in the effects of the ordering of
questions.
The pattern of findings with the older children and adults is consistent with Girotto et al. (2007)
evidence that the focus of counterfactual thinking changes depending on the perspective participants
take; when adults and 11-year-olds adopted the perspective of others prior to making blame judg-
ments, their counterfactual thinking tended to focus on the actions and decisions of the protagonist
(as demonstrated by their explanations; e.g., ‘‘She could have won if she had not switched”). On the
other hand, when they made blame judgments themselves, they were more likely to focus on the sit-
uational factors contributing to a particular negative outcome (e.g., ‘‘It was a game of chance”).
The extant literature on children’s self-rated versus others’ judgments is currently quite sparse and
has focused primarily on studies of children’s gender stereotypes, where it has been found that by
272 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275

8 years of age children tend to think that others hold more stereotyped beliefs about gender roles than
they themselves do (Prentice and Miller, 1996). In the current study, the asymmetry between self-
rated and others’ judgments was not as apparent for 6- and 8-year-olds as it was for the older children
and adults due to the tendency on the part of the younger children to attribute equal blame to the
characters for both types of blame judgments. We interpret this finding as a reflection of children’s
use of a ‘‘same” or ‘‘equal” judgment as a default response in the context of equal outcomes. In that
case, the younger children’s greater attribution of ‘‘equal blame” may derive from either (or both)
of two possibilities: (a) a tendency to heavily focus on event outcomes when making blame judgments
(Piaget, 1932) or (b) a lesser tendency to be affected by counterfactual thinking when making these
kinds of judgments (as was found here with regard to the biasing effect of temporal order and action).
In summary, the current findings extend previous research on children’s counterfactual thinking in
a number of important ways. First, the findings provide additional evidence for the view that whatever
counterfactual thinking abilities may be present at 6 years of age, children of that age are either unable
or unlikely to engage those abilities when making emotion or social judgments. Second, by revealing a
significant increase with age in the percentage of target responses, the current findings show that
biases in counterfactual thinking do not necessarily emerge together with the ability to think counter-
factually. Third, these findings provide evidence that the contexts associated with some biases may
serve as a stronger prompt for counterfactual thinking than is the case with others and, thus, may
emerge earlier developmentally. Lastly, the current findings also provide new evidence suggesting
that there are developmental changes in the effects of self versus other perspectives on children’s
blame judgments.

Limitations

There are several limitations of the current study that should be acknowledged. First, it should be
noted that children’s proneness to counterfactual thinking biases was studied indirectly via assessing
whether these biases would affect their judgments of regret and blame. Thus, it cannot be inferred from
these findings that young children’s thinking is necessarily impervious to these biases for all kinds of
judgments. It is possible that their counterfactual thinking is affected by the temporal order or action
bias when they imagine alternatives to reality, but their judgments of regret and blame might not be
similarly affected. Second, although these findings demonstrate dramatic age differences in the effect
of mutability on judgments of regret and blame, they do not directly illuminate the factors responsible
for these differences and future research is warranted to explore them. Third, this study examined the
influence of temporal order and action bias via one set of scenarios. Future research might use a range
of different scenarios, perhaps including outcomes with varying degress of severity. In that way, it
would be possible to assess whether more serious consequences of norm violations would lead to an
earlier emergence of counterfactual biases. Lastly, future research might use larger samples, which
would make possible the application of more sophisticated statistical approaches in an attempt to iden-
tify the causal factors responsible for the age differences in response patterns found here.

Appendix A

Omission/commission story

In a school, the principal organized a game for the students in each of two classes. For this game, a
student makes a choice between two boxes. There is a win sticker in only one of the boxes, and if the
student picks the box that has the sticker, she and everyone else in her class each wins $10.
The teacher of Class 1 chose Amy to play the game and showed her the two boxes: a green box and
a red box. Amy thought for a while and picked the green box. The teacher asked Amy if she wanted to
change her choice. Amy decided to stay with the green box. Unfortunately, the red box was the win-
ning box, so no one in that class won anything.
The teacher of Class 2 chose Barb to play the game and showed her two boxes: a blue box and a
white box. Barb thought for a while and picked the blue box. The teacher asked Barb if she wanted
 A. Payir, R. Guttentag / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 183 (2019) 261–275 273

to change her choice. Barb decided to switch from the blue box to the white box. Unfortunately, the
blue box was the winning box, so no one in that class won anything.
So, remember: Amy first picked the green box. When the teacher asked her whether she wanted to
change her choice, Amy decided to stay with the green box. But the red box had the prize, so Amy and
everyone in her class lost the game. In a different class, Barb first picked the blue box. When the tea-
cher asked her whether she wanted to change her choice, she said that she did want to switch, so she
switched from the blue box to the white box. But the blue box had the prize, so Barb and everyone in
her class also lost the game.
So, who do you think would feel worse about the choice she made? Amy, who picked the green box
at first and didn’t change her mind and lost because the red box was the winner, or Barb, who picked
the blue box at first but then switched to the white box and lost because the blue box was the winner?
Or do you think they would feel equally bad? Why do you think so?
Because each girl lost the game, no one in either girl’s class won anything. Who do you think would
be blamed more by the others in her class for having lost the game? Amy, who picked the green box at
first and didn’t change her mind and lost because the red box was the winner, or Barb, who picked the
blue box at first but then switched to the white box and lost because the white box was the winner?
Or do you think they would be blamed equally? Why do you think so?
Who do you think deserves to be blamed more? Or do you think they deserve equal blame? Why do
you think so?

Temporal order story

In a different school, the principal organized a different game. For this game, two students are cho-
sen to play, and each student picks a card—either a yellow card or an orange card. If they both pick the
yellow card or both pick the orange card, they and each of their classmates win $10. However, if one of
them picks the yellow card and the other picks the orange card, no one wins anything.
The teacher selected Michael and Rob to play this game. Michael went first. Rob was not in the
room when Michael picked his card. Michael looked at the yellow card and the orange card and
decided to pick the orange card. Then Rob came into the room and it was his turn. Rob didn’t know
that Michael had picked the orange card. Rob looked at the cards and decided to pick the yellow card.
So, because one picked orange and the other picked yellow, neither of them won anything and none of
their classmates won anything.
So, remember: Everyone wins if Michael and Rob pick the same color card. Michael went first and
picked the orange card. Rob didn’t know what card Michael had picked, and when he went second he
picked the yellow card. Because one picked orange and the other picked yellow, they lost the game.
So, who do you think would feel worse about the choice he made? Michael, who went first and
picked the orange card, or Rob, who went second and picked the yellow card? Or do you think they
would feel equally bad? Why do you think so?
Because they lost the game, no one in either boy’s class won anything. Who do you think would be
blamed more by the others in their class for having lost the game? Michael, who went first and picked
the orange card, or Rob, who went second and picked the yellow card? Or do you think they would be
blamed equally? Why do you think so?
Who do you think deserves to be blamed more for not winning the game? Or do you think they
deserve equal blame? Why do you think so?

Appendix B. Supplementary material

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.02.

007.

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