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

Abstract

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).