Expectation violations, expectation change, and expectation persistence: The scientific landscape as revealed by bibliometric network analyses

Abstract

Expectation violations occur when there is a discrepancy between expected and perceived events or experiences. However, expectations often persist despite disconfirming evidence. Therefore, research on expectation violations, expectation change, and expectation persistence has been conducted in several fields of psychology with wide-ranging theoretical assumptions and empirical considerations. In the present review, we analyzed how these research fields relate to each other via bibliometric network analyses. For this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature search to identify scientific publications on expectation violations, expectation change, and expectation persistence. The literature corpus was then quantitatively analyzed using similarity measures that allow a data-driven classification of publications into groups, revealing their conceptual, theoretical, and empirical commonalities. Our results indicate that many influential publications have focused on finding reactivity measures (e.g., brain activation) to the discrepancy experienced between expectations and outcomes. Furthermore, these measures have been used to assess when and to which degree learning and behavioral adaptation (i.e., expectation change) takes place. We discuss the potential application of these measures for understanding expectation violations in more complex settings (e.g., social interaction) as well as phenomena such as expectation persistence. The goal of this review was to foster interdisciplinarity in psychology, enabling scientists and practitioners to identify new topics, promising empirical approaches and previously neglected variables.