Counterfactual Reasoning

How do people explore what-if questions? Counterfactual thinking is critical to many areas of human inference and decision-making, allowing us to imagine alternative worlds and infer what would have happened if we’d taken different actions. We investigate how people generate counterfactuals and how they use them to assign causality, blame and praise. We also explore the close link between causal and counterfactual reasoning.

The TOWARD project – Evaluating impact-based weather warnings in Southeast Asia

Project Team: Carolin Echterbeck (University College London), Prof. Adam Harris (University College London), Dr. Henrik Singmann (University College London),

Dr. Sarah Jenkins (Centre for Decision Research, University of Leeds)

TOWARD (Triangulation Of Warning & Response Data evaluations) is a 3-year project funded by the Met Office’s WCSSP Southeast Asia initiative. Our aim is to understand how people make decisions when receiving severe weather warnings and to quantify the added value of impact-based weather warnings (IBWs) compared to traditional (hazard-based) warnings. Using natural experiments, we aim to develop a method that can evaluate whether IBWs reduce the impacts of severe weather events, such as the number of casualties or infrastructure damage. Additionally, we apply NLP to analyse emergency management reports on responses taken during severe weather events in Southeast Asia to identify where responses are as intended and where they are not.