The co-construction of counterfactual worlds in parent–child reminiscing.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Counterfactual thinking plays a central role in human judgment and decision making. Most of what we know about its development comes from studies where children are prompted to reason counterfactually. In which everyday contexts do children first hear and produce counterfactuals? In this study, we explored parent-child reminiscing as a promising context. We propose that children's early counterfactual thinking might be scaffolded by caregivers via a co-construction process, whereby one dyad member offers an antecedent (e.g., "If we'd remembered an umbrella") and the other offers a consequent (e.g., "we wouldn't be wet."). Sixty-two parent-child dyads (children aged 3-6 years) discussed positive and negative shared past events and were later prompted to discuss "what could have happened differently." We analyzed conversations for the dynamics of co-constructed counterfactuals and the forms any counterfactuals took, including their structure (additive or subtractive), direction (upward or downward), and controllability (controllable or uncontrollable). While spontaneous counterfactuals arose infrequently, all dyads produced counterfactuals when prompted. Parents frequently introduced counterfactual frames that children could build on, leading to co-construction. Counterfactuals were slightly more common following negative or unexpected events compared with positive and routine ones. Both parents and children predominantly focused on controllable aspects of events, suggesting a shared recognition of which counterfactuals are most useful for behavior change. Our results highlight the role of parent-child conversations in supporting the development of counterfactual reasoning and suggest potential pathways for fostering this skill in early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".