Surprise

About: Surprise is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99386 citations.

Uncertainty and surprise in complex systems : questions working with the unexpected

Abstract: Uncertainty and Surprise: An Introduction.- Understanding Social and Economic Systems as Evolutionary Complex Systems.- Managing the Unexpected.- Surprises in Half of a Century.- An Integrated View of Uncertainty and Surprise.- Fundamental 'Uncertainty' in Science.- The Complementary Nature of Coordination Dynamics: Self-Organization and the Creation of Information.- The tyranny of Many Dimensionless Constants: A Constraint on Knowability.- View for the Inside: The Task of Managing Uncertainty and Surprise.- Chaos.- The Social Construction of Uncertainty in Healthcare Delivery.- Primary Care Practice: Uncertainty and Surprise.- Medical Errors and Microsystems: The Best Things Cannot be Told.- Organization and Leadership in Hospitals.- Fundamental Uncertainty in Business: Real Options.- Approaching the Unknown in Appalachia.- Uncertainty and Certainty.- Uncertainty and Surprise: Ideas from the Open Discussion.

Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise

Abstract: This paper uses newly available evidence to shed light on the circumstances and causes of the 6 October 1973 Yom Kippur surprise attack of Egyptian and Syrian forces on Israeli positions at the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. The evidence suggests that an important circumstance that accounts for the surprise effect these actions managed to produce, despite ample warning signs, is traceable to a high need for cognitive closure among major figures in the Israeli intelligence establishment. Such a need may have prompted leading intelligence analysts to “freeze” on the conventional wisdom that an attack was unlikely and to become impervious to information suggesting that it was imminent. The discussion considers the psychological forces affecting intelligence operations in predicting the initiation of hostile enemy activities, and it describes possible avenues of dealing with the psychological impediments to open–mindedness that may pervasively characterize such circumstances.

Affective and cognitive validation of thoughts: An appraisal perspective on anger, disgust, surprise, and awe.

Abstract: Anger, disgust, surprise, and awe are multifaceted emotions. Both anger and disgust are associated with feeling unpleasant as well as experiencing a sense of confidence, whereas surprise and awe tend to be more pleasant emotions that are associated with doubt. Most prior work has examined how appraisals (confidence, pleasantness) lead people to experience different emotions or to experience different levels of intensity within the same emotion. Instead, the current research focused on the consequences (rather the antecedents) of appraisals of emotion, and it focuses specifically on the consequences for thought usage rather than the consequences for generating many or few thoughts. We show that when these four emotions are induced following thought generation, thoughts can be used either more or less with each emotion depending on whether the pleasantness/unpleasantness or confidence/doubt appraisal is made salient. In five experiments, it was predicted and found that anger and disgust following thought generation led to more thought use than surprise and awe when a confidence appraisal for the emotion was encouraged, but led to less thought use than surprise and awe when a pleasantness appraisal was made salient. The current studies are the first to reveal that different appraisals can lead to different (even opposite) outcomes on thought usage within the same experimental design. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

"I've Never Seen Anything Like It": Overstatement, Understatement, and Irony

Abstract: Two experiments tested the extent to which surprise is indicated by overstatement, understatement, and irony. When events mm out unexpectedly and the expectations of characters were explicit, irony was more effective than overstatement and understatement. When expectations were not explicit and the situation had a negative outcome, overstatement was more effective than irony and understatement. The results show that the expressions do more than provide an inconsistency to trigger conversational implicature. The implications of these findings for theories of nonliteral language comprehension are discussed.

Surprise, value and control in anterior cingulate cortex during speeded decision-making.

Abstract: Activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is observed across a variety of contexts, and its function remains intensely debated in the field of cognitive neuroscience. While traditional views emphasize its role in inhibitory control (suppressing prepotent, incorrect actions), recent proposals suggest a more active role in motivated control (invigorating actions to obtain rewards). Lagging behind empirical findings, formal models of dACC function primarily focus on inhibitory control, highlighting surprise, choice difficulty and value of control as key computations. Although successful in explaining dACC involvement in inhibitory control, it remains unclear whether these mechanisms generalize to motivated control. In this study, we derive predictions from three prominent accounts of dACC and test these with functional magnetic resonance imaging during value-based decision-making under time pressure. We find that the single mechanism of surprise best accounts for activity in dACC during a task requiring response invigoration, suggesting surprise signalling as a shared driver of inhibitory and motivated control. The role of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in decision-making and cognitive control is the subject of a long-standing debate. Vassena et al. tested the dominant accounts in the same paradigm and found that the ACC signals the difference between predicted and actual outcomes.