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

Hu, Yaoping; Yang, Yingying; Huang, Peng; Ai, Danfeng; Sun, Hongli; Zhou, Dan; Huangliang, Jiecheng; Yin, Jun

doi:10.1037/xhp0001097

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Such action generalization has been found very early in development (Powell & Spelke, 2013) and, importantly, was not observed when social group cues were removed (Duan et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2019). Moreover, further studies have revealed that implicit action generalization is based on common goals among group members, rather than shallow‐level movements (Yin et al., 2022, 2023; Hu et al., 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valence‐Dependent Implicit Action Generalization Among Group Members

Huangliang,

Hu,

Zheng

et al. 2024

Cognitive Science

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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.

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