Oh … so close! Children’s close counterfactual reasoning and emotion inferences.

How we feel about an outcome often depends on how close an alternative outcome was to occurring. In four experiments, we investigated whether predominantly White, middle-class, Canadian children (N = 425, Experiments 1-3) and American adults (N = 227, Experiment 4) consider close counterfactual alternatives when inferring other people's emotions. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (but not 4- and 5-year-olds) inferred that an agent would feel sadder...