Norms and the Perception of Events

这项行动为美国空军科学研究办公室提供资金，用于美国国家科学基金会在这项联合资助的研究项目中的份额，该项目的首席研究员是加州大学伯克利分校心理学系的丹尼尔·卡尼曼博士。该研究将研究(1)对反复观察的物体的期望的发展，以及(2)管理人们比较物体和事件的规范和标准的规则，例如判断一只鸭子大，或者一个运动员动作笨拙。本研究将采用一种新的实验范式——小事件范式。面对电脑或电视屏幕的观察者将会接触到一系列的迷你事件，其中一个或两个小物体在运动中被看到5-10秒。同样的“个体”物体会在一系列情节中周期性地出现。单个物体的行为不会严格重复，但每个物体都会表现出某种一致性，从而使观察者对每个单独的物体形成不同的印象。观察人士会对每一件事的意外程度进行评级，从“非常意外”到“完全不意外”。在一系列迷你事件之后，观察者将看到测试事件，并将每个测试事件与指定的标准进行比较，例如“评估每个物体的移动速度，相对于相同颜色的物体在第一个系列事件中的移动速度”。惊喜措施将直接衡量期望的发展，并在适当设计的一系列小型活动中，回答以下问题：(i)期望发展的速度有多快？（ii）对于一个特定对象来说，一个非常不寻常的行为的单个实例对预期的长期影响是什么？这种行为在很长一段时间后再次出现，会被认为是相对不足为奇的吗？（iii）当一个对象以一种新的方式行为时，这如何影响对其他对象行为的规范和期望？在实验结束时获得的比较判断要求观察者对实验者指定的实例集合形成一个表征。这些判断类似于人们在日常生活中经常做出的判断，在这些判断中，人们被要求思考任意类别，例如，回答一个关于街对面邻居的友好程度的问题，或者关于他们的狗的大小的问题。这些实验将探索当我们试图构建这些类别时，决定哪些实例出现在脑海中的规则。这些实验也将提供另一种自发分类的方法。期望是，当观察者被要求将测试事件与它的“自然”类别联系起来时，他们将是最快和最准确的。

This action provides funds to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for NSF's share of this jointly funded research project, the principal investigator of which is Dr. Daniel Kahneman of the Psychology Department of the University of California-Berkeley. The research will study (1) the development of expectations about objects that are observed on repeated occasions, and (2) the rules that govern the norms and standards to which people compare objects and events, for example in judging that a duck is large, or that an athlete moves awkwardly. The research will employ a new experimental paradigm, the mini-event paradigm. Observers facing a computer or TV screen will be exposed to a series of mini-events, in which one or two small objects are seen in motion for 5-10 seconds. The same "individual" objects will reappear periodically in a series of episodes. The behavior of individual objects will not be strictly repetitive, but each one will show some consistency, allowing observers to form distinct impressions of each individual object. Observers will rate each event on a scale of surprise, from "highly surprising" to "completely unsurprising". Following a series of mini-events, observers will be shown test events, and will compare each test event to a designated standard, for example "evaluate how fast each object moves, relative to the speed with which objects of the same color moved in the first series of events". The surprise measure will provide a direct measure of the development of expectations, and, in properly designed series of mini-events, answers to questions such as the following: (i) How quickly do expectations develop? (ii) What are the long-term effects on expectations of a single instance of a behavior that is highly unusual for a particular object? Will a recurrence of that behavior after a long interval be judged relatively unsurprising? (iii) When one object behaves in a new way, how does this affect the norms and expectations for the behavior of other objects? The comparative judgments that will be obtained at the end of the session require the observer to form a representation of a collection of instances specified by the experimenter. These judgments are similar to those commonly made in everyday life, in which people are asked to think about arbitrary categories, for example, to answer a question about the friendliness of neighbors on the other side of the street, or about the size of their dogs. The experiments will explore the rules that determine which instances come to mind when we try to construct such categories. The experiments will also provide another measure of spontaneous categorization. The expectation is that observers will be fastest and most accurate when they are asked to relate a test event to its "natural" category, the one to which it would have been spontaneously assigned.