Using Perspective Taking and Information Paucity to Explore Alternative Realities

The reported experiment examined perspective taking and information paucity as candidate interventions to enhance performance in a counterfactual forecasting task. We hypothesized that these interventions would increase the number and diversity of hypotheses generated in support of counterfactual reasoning and, in turn, improve accuracy in forecasting. We also examined whether the manipulations influenced the retrospective estimates of criteria relevant to a historical event and the accuracy of future forecasts. Participants were tasked with completing two historical counterfactual exercises-the first involved the West African Ebola outbreak, while the second was related to the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. Participants in an information paucity group did not receive the full description of the historical event at once. Instead, they received a summary of the historical event followed by four troves of information, organized by topic, sequentially in random order. Participants in an immersive perspective-taking group were asked to take on three perspectives: 1) healthcare professional, 2) economist, and 3) legislator. There was also a third experimental group that received both interventions and a control group that did not receive any of the interventions. We found that sequential presentation and perspective-taking increased the number of counterfactual Hypotheses and the diversity of the generated counterfactual Hypotheses across both scenarios. Unfortunately, the differences in counterfactual reasoning did not translate to differences in the forecasting accuracy of the participants.