What if Roe v. Wade never happened, we never went to war in the Persian Gulf and Clinton was never elected president?Some professors at Ohio State are contemplating questions like these. These historians, known as counterfactualists, are studying history from a hypothetical perspective. In November a group of counterfactulalists convened at OSU to make the case that the understanding of history can be enhanced by changing one significant fact and examining other outcomes.”This underscores the notion that there are few inevitabilities in history and leads to a more sophisticated appreciation of causation,” said Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of psychology.”There’s a natural human tendency to wonder why things happen as they do,” Tetlock said. “We do it all the time, especially in our own lives.”There are many significant social turning points in history, Tetlock said. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King are all examples. What would the outcome have been if these killings had not taken place? Where would these men be today? And where would we be as a nation, Tetlock asks. “At our conference, we went back 2,500 years and examined the war between the Persians and Greeks,” Tetlock said. “What if there had been a change in tactics and events, and the Persians had won?”Tetlock said the implications would be enormous.”I doubt that western civilization would be as we know it today,” he said. “And these type examinations are nothing new. Man has been asking ‘What if?’ for thousands of years.Professor Richard Lebow, another organizer of the conference said counterfactual studies also help historians eliminate what he calls “hindsight bias.””After an event has taken place, people read just their estimates of the probability of that happening,” Lebow said. “That makes history appear more preordained than it really is. We want to get people to better understand contingency, that there are many realistic possibilities for what actually happens.”Though she said it is not largely examined by historians, Professor Penny Russell said she sees the value of asking “what if?”She thinks it can be a learning tool, can enhance critical thinking and may help people do their work well. “What if the Constitution had initially outlawed slavery?” Russell said. “What if Hitler had lived and won the war? Then what would have been the outcome of these events?”