Making sense of surprise: An investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments.

Abstract

Surprise is often defined in terms of disconfirmed expectations, whereby the surprisingness of an event is thought to be dependent on the degree to which it contrasts with a more likely, or expected, outcome. The authors investigated the alternative hypothesis that surprise is more accurately modeled as a manifestation of an ongoing sense-making process. In a series of experiments, participants were given a number of scenarios and rated surprise and probability for various hypothetical outcomes that either confirmed or disconfirmed an expectation. Experiment 1 demonstrated that representational specificity influences the relationship that holds between surprise and probability ratings. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the inclusion of an enabling event lowers surprise ratings for disconfirming outcomes. Experiment 3 explored the reason for this effect, revealing that enabling events lower surprise by reducing uncertainty, thus enhancing ease of integration. Experiment 4 evaluated the contrast hypothesis directly, showing that differences in contrast are not correlated with differences in surprise. These results provide converging support for the view that the level of surprise experienced for an event is related to the difficulty of integrating that event with an existing representation.

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

“…Though surprise clearly involves an emotional reaction (often accompanied by a startle response), it also seems to serve a strategic, cognitive goal, as it directs attention to explain why the surprising event occurred and to learn for the future (e.g., Macedo, 2010;Maguire, Maguire & Keane, 2011;Ranganath & Rainer, 2003). Originally conceived of as a "basic emotion" (e.g., Darwin, 1872;Ekman & Friesen, 1971;Izard, 1977;Plutchik, 1991;Tomkins, 1962), more recently surprise has been re-appraised as a cognitive state because, unlike most emotions, it can be either positively or negatively valenced (Ortony & Turner, 1990; see also Kahneman & Miller, 1986;Maguire et al, 2011). Indeed, nowadays, cognitive aspects of surprise are routinely mentioned in the affective literature; for instance, Wilson and Gilbert (2008) explicitly discuss explanatory aspects of surprise in affective adaptation.…”

“…Examples of the materials used in Experiment 1 (adapted from Maguire et al, 2011): The known (Louise) and less-known (Bob) scenarios are divided into setting and outcome parts (not explicitly labelled in the presented materials).…”

“…By definition, previous surprise research has often examined apects of how scenarios cue relevant knowledge (e.g., Choi & Nisbett, 2000;Gendolla, 1997;Gendolla & Koller, 2001;Maguire et al, 2011;Teigen & Keren, 2002, though it has not been framed in this way. For example, Maguire et al (2011;Maguire & Keane, 2006) presented people with short stories, in which they first presented the setting information, followed by a surprising outcome, and asked them to judge the surprisingness of the outcome (see materials in Table 1).…”

“…For example, Maguire et al (2011;Maguire & Keane, 2006) presented people with short stories, in which they first presented the setting information, followed by a surprising outcome, and asked them to judge the surprisingness of the outcome (see materials in Table 1). Much of their research used scenarios where the outcome confirmed or disconfirmed expectations, and they showed that the ease of integrating an outcome into an existing representation (presumably created from the preceding setting) affected perceived surprise.…”

“…Anecdotally, when we re-examined the story scenarios used by Maguire et al (2011) they appeared to divide into these two classes. This intuition was confirmed by a pre-test that involving sorting the stories into based on an assessment of their outcomes (see Materials section).…”