The Unexpected Unexpected and the Expected Unexpected: How People's Conception of the Unexpected is Not That Unexpected

TL;DR

This paper investigates how people's conception of the unexpected often aligns more with familiar, expected surprises than truly inventive ones, revealing biases in how we perceive unexpected events.

Contribution

It introduces a nuanced distinction between expected and unexpected unexpected outcomes and empirically examines how people conceive of the unexpected in everyday scenarios.

Findings

People tend to conceive of the unexpected as familiar surprises.

Object choices in responses are weakly influenced by recency effects.

People's conception of the unexpected is more predictable than truly inventive.

Abstract

The answers people give when asked to 'think of the unexpected' for everyday event scenarios appear to be more expected than unexpected. There are expected unexpected outcomes that closely adhere to the given information in a scenario, based on familiar disruptions and common plan-failures. There are also unexpected unexpected outcomes that are more inventive, that depart from given information, adding new concepts/actions. However, people seem to tend to conceive of the unexpected as the former more than the latter. Study 1 tests these proposals by analysing the object-concepts people mention in their reports of the unexpected and the agreement between their answers. Study 2 shows that object-choices are weakly influenced by recency, the order of sentences in the scenario. The implications of these results for ideas in philosophy, psychology and computing is discussed