Valence-Dependent Implicit Action Generalization Among Group Members.

People implicitly generalize the actions of known individuals in a social group to unknown members. However, actions have social goals and evaluative valences, and the extent to which actions with different valences (helpful and harmful) are implicitly generalized among group members remains unclear. We used computer animations to simulate social group actions, where helping and hindering actions were represented by aiding and obstructing another's climb up a hill. Study 1 found that helpful actions are implicitly expected to be shared among members of the same group but not among members of different groups, but no such effect was found for harmful actions. This suggests that helpful actions are more likely than harmful actions to be implicitly generalized to group members. This finding was replicated in Study 2 by increasing the group size from three to five. Study 3 found that the null effect for generalizing harmful actions among group members is not due to the difficulty of detecting action generalization, as both helpful and harmful actions are similarly generalized within particular individuals. Moreover, Study 4 demonstrated that weakening social group information resulted in the absence of implicit generalization for helpful actions, suggesting the specificity of group membership. Study 5 revealed that the generalization of helping actions occurred when actions were performed by multiple group members rather than being repeated by one group member, showing group-based inductive generalization. Overall, these findings support valence-dependent implicit action generalization among group members. This implies that people may possess different knowledge regarding valenced actions on category-based generalization.

More evidence, greater generalization? The relation between the prevalence of observed action and the strength of generalization depends on action properties.

Although group members may be diverse and have their own reasons for actions, people tend to generalize the actions of known members to unknown cases from the observer's perspective. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether action generalization is entirely determined by statistical evidence or is additionally constrained by prior knowledge or beliefs toward group members' actions. Given that people specifically believe that group members pursue common action goals, we hypothesized that action generalization is constrained by this belief. Accordingly, the extent of generalizing a goal underlying action does not always increase as the prevalence of the goal increases; instead, a strict monotonicity effect is observed for the action's movement. We found that the common goal is generalized to a new group member only when all sampled group members have this target property, revealing that the relation between the prevalence of goals and the strength of their generalization violates strict monotonicity (Studies 1a and 1b). In contrast, the more group members perform the same movement, the more likely this movement is to be generalized to an unknown group member, showing monotonic generalization of movements (Studies 3a, 3b, and 3c). Importantly, these dissociative generalizations are specific to entitative social groups (Studies 2, 4, and 6) and not due to differences in experimental tasks between studies. In shared experimental paradigms, when the goal status is available, the monotonic generalization of actions is not found; however, when the goal status is unavailable and the movement is still accessed, the monotonic generalization of actions is observed (Study 5). Thus, our findings highlight that the belief that group members pursue a common goal constrains action generalization to a greater extent than statistical evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Members of highly entitative groups are implicitly expected to behave consistently based on their deep-level goals instead of their shallow-level movements.

The current study investigated whether the deep properties or shallow features of behaviors are implicitly expected to be consistent across members of highly entitative groups, by exploiting the notion that goals-as deep properties-and movements-as shallow features-can be dissociated in object-directed behaviors. Participants were asked to view group members' goal-directed behaviors toward an object. Whether perceivers implicitly expected that a new member would perform the same movement to the previously visited location (i.e., exhibit shallow feature-based behavior) or a new movement to the previously visited object (i.e., exhibit deep property-based behavior) was recorded. Study 1 revealed that perceivers implicitly expected members of a highly entitative group to approach the previously visited object with a new movement (i.e., to have a consistent goal) rather than perform the same movement to the previously visited location (i.e., to express a consistent movement). Study 2 confirmed that the responses in Study 1 were explained by group members conforming to, rather than violating, internal expectations (i.e., of consistent movement). Importantly, the implicit expectation of shared behaviors across group members relies on the goal interpretation of actions instead of the associations between actions and outcomes (Study 3). Study 4 replicated the facilitation effect of Study 1 and revealed that the goal-based expectation of common behaviors among group members is based on the majority behavior instead of a single demonstration. Hence, individuals in highly entitative groups are implicitly expected to behave consistently based on the deep properties of behaviors instead of their shallow features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).