Shades of surprise: Assessing surprise as a function of degree of deviance and expectation constraints

Merging recent surprise theories renders the prediction that surprise is a function of how strong an event deviates from what was expected and of how easily this event can be integrated into the constraints of an activated expectation. The present research investigates the impact of both these factors on the behavioral, affective, experiential, and cognitive surprise responses. In two experiments (total N = 1257), participants were instructed that ten stimuli of a certain type would appear on the screen. Crucially, we manipulated the degree of deviance of the last stimulus by showing a stimulus that deviated to either no, a medium, or a high degree from the previous nine stimuli. Orthogonally to this deviation, we induced an expectation with either high, moderate, or low constraints prior to the experimental task. We measured behavioral response delay and explicit ratings of liking, surprise, and expectancy. Our findings point out an overall only low association between the behavioral, affective, experiential, and cognitive surprise responses and reveal rather dichotomous response patterns that differentiate between deviance and non-deviance of an event. Challenging previous accounts, the present evidence further implies that surprise is not about the ease of integrating an event with the constraints of an explicit a-priori expectation but rather reflects the automatic outcome of implicit discrepancy detection, resulting from a continuous cognitive fine-tuning of expectations.

The Cognitive-Evolutionary Model of Surprise: A Review of the Evidence

Research on surprise relevant to the cognitive-evolutionary model of surprise proposed by Meyer, Reisenzein, and Schützwohl (1997) is reviewed. The majority of the assumptions of the model are found empirically supported. Surprise is evoked by unexpected (schema-discrepant) events and its intensity is determined by the degree if schema-discrepancy, whereas the novelty and the valence of the eliciting events probably do not have an independent effect. Unexpected events cause an automatic interruption of ongoing mental processes that is followed by an attentional shift and attentional binding to the events, which is often followed by causal and other event analysis processes and by schema revision. The facial expression of surprise postulated by evolutionary emotion psychologists has been found to occur rarely in surprise, for as yet unknown reasons. A physiological orienting response marked by skin conductance increase, heart rate deceleration, and pupil dilation has been observed to occur regularly in the standard version of the repetition-change paradigm of surprise induction, but the specificity of these reactions as indicators of surprise is controversial. There is indirect evidence for the assumption that the feeling of surprise consists of the direct awareness of the schema-discrepancy signal, but this feeling, or at least the self-report of surprise, is also influenced by experienced interference. In contrast, facial feedback probably does contribute substantially to the feeling of surprise and the evidence for the hypothesis that surprise is affected by the difficulty of explaining an unexpected event is, in our view, inconclusive. Regardless of how the surprise feeling is constituted, there is evidence that it has both motivational and informational effects. Finally, the prediction failure implied by unexpected events sometimes causes a negative feeling, but there is no convincing evidence that this is always the case, and we argue that even if it were so, this would not be a sufficient reason for regarding this feeling as a component, rather than as an effect of surprise.

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

Early theories of surprise, including Darwin's, argued that it was predominantly a basic emotion. Recently, theories have taken a more cognitive view of surprise, casting it as a process of "making sense of surprising events". The current paper advances the view that the essence of this sense-making process is explanation; specifically, that people's perception of surprise is a metacognitive estimate of the cognitive work involved in explaining an abnormal event. So, some surprises are more surprising because they are harder to explain. This proposal is tested in eight experiments that explore how (i) the contents of memory can influence surprise, (ii) different classes of scenarios can retrieve more/less relevant knowledge from memory to explain surprising outcomes, (iii) how partial explanations constrain the explanation process, reducing surprise, and (iv) how, overall, any factor that acts to increase the cognitive work in explaining a surprising event, results in higher levels of surprise (e.g., task demands to find three rather than one explanations). Across the present studies, using different materials, paradigms and measures, it is consistently and repeatedly found that the difficulty of explaining a surprising outcome is the best predictor for people's perceptions of the surprisingness of events. Alternative accounts of these results are considered, as are future directions for this research.

Maintaining faith in agency under immutable constraints: cognitive consequences of believing in negotiable fate

Negotiable fate refers to the idea that one can negotiate with fate for control, and that people can exercise personal agency within the limits that fate has determined. Research on negotiable fate has found greater prevalence of related beliefs in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe and English-speaking countries. The present research extends previous findings by exploring the cognitive consequences of the belief in negotiable fate. It was hypothesized that this belief enables individuals to maintain faith in the potency of their personal actions and to remain optimistic in their goal pursuits despite the immutable constraints. The belief in negotiable fate was predicted to (a) facilitate sense-making of surprising outcomes; (b) increase persistence in goal pursuits despite early unfavorable outcomes; and (c) increase risky choices when individuals have confidence in their luck. Using multiple methods (e.g., crosscultural comparisons, culture priming, experimental induction of fate beliefs), we found supporting evidence for our hypotheses in three studies. Furthermore, as expected, the cognitive effects of negotiable fate are observed only in cultural contexts where the fate belief is relatively prevalent. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the intersubjective approach to understanding the influence of culture on cognitive processes (e.g., Chiu, Gelfand, Yamagishi, Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010), the sociocultural foundations that foster the development of a belief in negotiable fate, and an alternative perspective for understanding the nature of agency in contexts where constraints are severe. Future research avenues are also discussed.

The effect of outcome information on health professionals' spontaneous learning

OBJECTIVES

Previous studies have demonstrated the presence of an outcome bias in medical decision making, which can be represented by a tendency to overweight outcome information when evaluating the quality of a decision. This study investigates whether the outcome of a previous decision on a medical case affects a later decision on a similar case.

METHODS

Thirty-six practising doctors and 36 nurses were presented with two superficially different but structurally identical dichotomous diagnostic problems, at intervals of about 6 weeks. The first problem was followed by the delivery of information about the outcome that could be either positive or negative.

RESULTS

Of the doctors, 39% of those who received information indicating an adverse outcome in the first case modified their diagnosis in the second case, whereas none of the doctors who were given information indicating a positive outcome made an alternative diagnosis. Of the nurses, 22% of those given information of a positive outcome and 56% of those given information of a negative outcome in the first case made an alternative decision in the second case.

CONCLUSIONS

The results show that the outcome of a previous single case can be overweighted in the process of making a later decision about a similar case, to the point that information on outcome alone can modify a decision that the health provider originally thought to be optimal, according to his or her experience and the available evidence. Hence, outcome bias not only affects the evaluation of a decision, but can also affect learning by modifying later decisions.

How many hindsight biases are there?

The answer is three: questioning a conceptual default assumption in hindsight bias research, we argue that the hindsight bias is not a unitary phenomenon but consists of three separable and partially independent subphenomena or components, namely, memory distortions, impressions of foreseeability and impressions of necessity. Following a detailed conceptual analysis including a systematic survey of hindsight characterizations in the published literature, we investigated these hindsight components in the context of political elections. We present evidence from three empirical studies that impressions of foreseeability and memory distortions (1) show hindsight effects that typically differ in magnitude and sometimes even in direction, (2) are essentially uncorrelated, and (3) are differentially influenced by extraneous variables. A fourth study found similar dissociations between memory distortions and impressions of necessity. All four studies thus provide support for a separate components view of the hindsight bias. An important consequence of such a view is that apparent contradictions in research findings as well as in theoretical explanations (e.g., cognitive vs. social-motivational) might be alleviated by taking differences between components into account. We also suggest conditions under which the components diverge or converge.