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Expectation
Expectation V Hoorens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium ã 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary Affective forecasting The prediction of one’s future moods and emotions. Comparative optimism The belief that one’s future will be better than the future of other people or of the average individual. Confirmation bias The tendency to selectively search or focus on information that is consistent with one’s prior expectation. Expectancy-value model A model that describes human motivation as a function of people’s beliefs about the likelihood that actions will create outcomes and about the subjective value or utility these people associate with the relevant outcomes. Expected utility The expected subjective value of an outcome.
Definition and Types of Expectations An expectation is a belief about events or behaviors that will occur or that will be revealed in the future. The objects of eventrelated expectations may be identifiable events (specific expectations, e.g., about an economic recession, about good weather), life in general, or the future in general (generalized expectations, e.g., about whether the future will be pleasant or unpleasant, or about whether important outcomes are generally controllable or uncontrollable). The objects of behavioral expectations may be overt behaviors (e.g., giving money to charity, attending a class) or covert behaviors (e.g., feeling happy, needing company) shown by the individuals who hold the expectations themselves or by third persons. Behavioral expectations about the self need to be distinguished from other types of future-oriented thinking, such as aspirations, wishes, behavioral intentions, and fantasies. Aspirations and wishes are the goals people hope to achieve rather than the goals they believe they will achieve. Behavioral intentions concern the actions people decide they will undertake rather than the actions they believe they will undertake. In fantasies, people pretend that something happens or that they perform some action rather than believe that it will truly happen or that they will perform it. Expectations may occur in relationship to various aspects of events or behaviors, such as these events’ or behaviors’ nature, their likelihood (i.e., the events’ or behaviors’ subjective probability or likelihood), their subjective value (i.e., the events’ or behaviors’ predicted or expected [subjective] utility), their consequences, or their duration. All these expectations may be either purely descriptive or normative. Descriptive expectations merely state what, according to the individual holding these expectations, will happen or will be revealed. Normative expectations
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Linguistic expectancy bias The tendency to describe expected behaviors in more abstract terms than unexpected behaviors. Overconfidence effect An unwarrantedly strong confidence in the accuracy of one’s own predictions. Self-defeating prophecy An expectation that affects the holder’s behavior in such a manner that this very behavior prevents the expectation from coming true. Self-fulfilling prophecy An expectation that affects the holder’s behavior in such a manner that this very behavior makes the expectation come true. Stereotype threat The unfavorable effect on an individual’s performance of this individual’s awareness of a negative stereotype about his or her group in the relevant performance domain. Subjective probability The perception of the likelihood by which an event or behavior will occur.
also state what, according to the individual holding them will happen yet with the prescriptive connotation that for logical, social, or moral reasons it should happen. Normative expectations are therefore closely related to norms.
Role of Expectations in Human Behavior Expectations are involved in almost any kind of human behavior. They play a particularly important role in learning, motivation, decision-making, affective responding, and social interaction.
Learning Signal learning, the prototypical form of classical conditioning, implies learning that the occurrence of a mundane stimulus predicts the subsequent occurrence of another, more meaningful stimulus. Instrumental or operant learning implies learning to expect rewards or punishments for specific behaviors. Signal learning also gives rise to generalized expectations about the predictability of important events, while operant learning gives rise to generalized expectations of controllability. Both generalized expectations have even been shown to crucially affect the well-being of both humans and animals. For instance, at the core of the learned helplessness phenomenon lies a generalized expectation of not being able to control important events in the future.
Motivation The central role of expectations in behavior is also reflected in so-called expectancy-value models of motivation that assume
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that people make choices on the basis of the subjective expectancy of attaining (or not attaining) given outcomes through a behavioral choice and of the value they place on attaining (or not attaining) these outcomes. The individual’s motivation to show some behavior depends on the multiplication of these two factors. Some famous expectancy-value models of behavior are Tolman’s expectancy theory, Eccles’ expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation, and Pekrun’s controlvalue model.
Decision-Making People make decisions based on their expectations both concerning their future preferences, tastes, feelings, and needs and concerning the likelihood of events, situations, and behavioral outcomes. One theory that formalizes the role of expectations in decision-making is prospect theory. This theory states that people choose between behavioral options on the basis of the expected subjective utility of each alternative’s outcome weighed by the subjective probability of these outcomes. An outcome is conceived of as a change relative to a reference point (i.e., as a loss or a gain) rather than as a state. The subjective utility of an outcome therefore depends on both the reference point and on the magnitude and the direction of the change. However, not all differences between outcomes are created equal. The further away two outcomes are from the reference point, the smaller the difference in subjective utility between them normally is. For instance, the difference between gaining $5 and gaining $10 ‘feels’ larger (in more formal terms: corresponds to a greater difference in subjective utility) than the difference between gaining $50 and gaining $55. The expected subjective utility of a loss or gain is a function of the outcome’s subjective utility adjusted for temporal distance. The more distant an outcome seems, the weaker its positive or negative value is (temporal discounting). Having to wait some time for a pleasant outcome renders that outcome less attractive than knowing that the outcome will arrive any moment. Similarly, knowing that an unpleasant outcome will only happen after some time renders it less aversive than knowing that it will arrive any moment. However, temporal discounting is generally steeper for losses than for gains. Postponing an unpleasant outcome reduces its expected aversiveness to a larger extent than postponing a pleasant outcome reduces its expected attractiveness. By consequence, outcomes that carry both advantages and disadvantages (i.e., outcomes that may be viewed as gains in some respects but as losses in other respects) often seem more attractive (or less unattractive) when they are envisioned in the distant future than when they are envisioned in the near future. This phenomenon may give rise to preference reversals, with one option seeming more attractive than another at some point in time (e.g., with the prospect of helping a friend move some weekend next spring seems more attractive than spending that weekend reading on the beach) but becoming less attractive as the relevant event comes nearer (e.g., with the prospect of spending the weekend reading on the beach becoming more attractive than helping the friend move on the Friday before it is all supposed to happen). Apart from expected utilities, the subjective probabilities or the expected likelihoods of events and behaviors also affect
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decision-making. Various biases occur in people’s estimation of these likelihoods. For instance, people tend to overestimate small likelihoods and underestimate high likelihoods. They also associate higher likelihoods with desirable outcomes than with undesirable outcomes and lower likelihoods with undesirable outcomes than with desirable outcomes. At the same time, people seem to be quite able to produce accurate estimates of likelihoods. In general, it seems that people are better able to estimate likelihoods when they are allowed to do so in a format that they would spontaneously use (e.g., by estimating frequencies of occurrence) than when they are forced to use a nonspontaneously used format (e.g., by estimating probabilities).
Affect In the domain of moods and feelings, it is generally believed that affective responses to events and behaviors sometimes depend on people’s expectations about how these events or behaviors will make them feel and on how their actual experiences depart from their expectations (cf. the affective expectation model). According to the affective expectation model, both assimilation and contrast effects may occur. People’s affective responses to an event or a behavior may be assimilated to these people’s prior expectations about how they will feel if the stimulus information they perceive does not differ too much from the stimulus information they expected. In these cases, people’s affective reactions resemble the affective reactions they had expected more than they would have done without the relevant expectations. For instance, an audience may have more fun viewing a moderately funny movie when this audience had previously expected to see a funny movie (and hence to have fun) than when the audience had expected to see a not-so-funny movie. If, however, the stimulus information so strongly departs from the expected information that the discrepancy gets noticed, contrast effects occur. In these cases, people’s affective reactions differ from the affective reactions they had expected more than they would have done without the relevant expectations. For instance, an audience may have less fun viewing a moderately funny movie when this audience had previously expected to see a wildly funny movie (and hence to have tremendous fun) and when the audience notices that the movie departs from this expectation than when the audience had expected to see a not-so-funny movie. This view that expectations influence affective reactions is at the basis of various models of consumer satisfaction in which satisfaction is believed to be a function of the confirmation versus disconfirmation of expectations. These models generally indicate that consumer satisfaction is highest when prior expectations are surpassed and lowest when expectations remain unfulfilled. As such, setting rather low expectation standards may, to some extent, enhance consumer satisfaction, whereas setting high expectation standards may reduce it.
Social Interaction People’s behavioral choices in interdependence situations are affected by their expectations about how the others involved will behave. Interdependence situations occur in group settings when the outcomes of group members’ behaviors depend on
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how the other group members behave so that each group member affects and is affected by others. For instance, when students work together on a group project, each student’s efforts may contribute toward a good grade, yet whether or not the effort of this individual student will ultimately prove useful depends on the work of the other students in the group as well. In interdependence situations like these, expectations about the behaviors of others may affect behavior in various directions. When people share a common good, the expectation that others’ contributions will be sufficient to build and maintain the common good may lead them to consume from the common good without contributing to it (free riding). Similarly, when people work on a group task, the expectation that others will work sufficiently hard sometimes leads them to invest less effort (social loafing). Ironically, the expectation that others will insufficiently contribute may also inhibit contributions out of fear of being taken advantage of. Only in specific cases (usually implying strong group cohesiveness) will the expectation that others will perform poorly or not contribute induce harder work and larger contributions (social compensation).
Sources Expectations about events may derive from an individual’s previous experiences with the relevant events or with similar events. They may also be based on verbal or numerical information individuals receive about other people’s experiences or even on their purely cognitive constructions or intuitive rulesof-thumb (named heuristics). To estimate events’ likelihoods, for instance, people may use statistical information to some extent. However, they also apply heuristics such as the availability heuristic (if I can easily remember or imagine examples of it, it must be likely). Moreover, people sometimes judge an event’s likelihood on the basis of whether they can figure a mechanism or scenario leading up to the event. One consequence is that when people are able to causally explain why given events might occur, their likelihood estimates for these events may be enhanced. This effect occurs even when people are aware of the fact that the events they have just explained were purely hypothetical. Similarly, interpersonal behavioral expectations may derive from the observer’s previous experience with the actors (the individuals whose behaviors are being predicted) as well as from implicit personality theories, stereotypes (including those associated with social roles), and projection from the observer’s own behaviors. For instance, an individual’s social values (e.g., individualism, competitiveness, altruism) have been shown to predict the social values according to which he or she expects others to behave in interdependence situations. Because people possess an unequalled basis of knowledge about their own overt and covert behaviors as compared to what they know about others, it would seem that their expectations about their own behaviors depend on their actual experiences rather than on stereotypes or on intuitive theories of personality and affect. Yet, it seems that even self-related expectations are based on theories and stereotypes. For instance, women may expect to experience mood swings caused by their hormone cycle because they have heard about the emotional effects of hormone-level changes on women.
Even if people process information without any prior expectations to guide them, expectations that arise online (i.e., while people are encoding the incoming information) may affect their interpretation of subsequent information elements. For instance, when people receive a variety of information about some other individual, the behaviors or personal characteristics that they encounter first may create an initial impression. This initial impression then serves as an expectation about the individual’s other behaviors and characteristics. The primacy effect (i.e., the phenomenon that initial information weighs relatively heavily on general impressions) is a case in point. One situation in which a primacy effect may occur is when emerging expectations lead people to interpret subsequent elements in a manner that is partial to their first impression.
Measurement Expectations are typically studied by asking people about them. Participants in studies are invited to verbally describe (either in their own words or, more frequently, using rating scales) what they think will happen or what they or others will do, how pleasant or unpleasant they think these future events or behaviors will be to them or to others, how likely they believe the events or behaviors are, or how long they think events or behaviors will last. The main problem with this approach is that verbal self-descriptions are vulnerable to selfpresentation tendencies (including social desirability). When researchers use rating scales to facilitate participants’ responding, their approach is also vulnerable to issues surrounding scale interpretation. People may differ in how they interpret specific response alternatives and hence how they view scale ranges. In addition, these interpretations may change over time. The latter problem is particularly troublesome in prospective studies on the accuracy of expectations. In prospective studies about how well people’s expectations match their actual experiences, researchers ask participants about the events or behaviors they expect. Later on, they either ask participants about the events or behaviors that have actually occurred or collect external data concerning the occurrence of these events or behaviors. To the extent that their original ratings differ from their later ratings, the expectation is said to have been inaccurate. Yet, participants’ ratings may differ not because their expectations were off the mark but because these participants’ scale use has changed. For instance, maturation may have taught them not to use extreme response alternatives lightly. In retrospective studies about how well people’s expectations match their actual experiences, researchers either ask participants about events or behaviors that have actually occurred or collect external data about the occurrence of these events or behaviors. They then ask participants about what they had expected concerning these events or behaviors. The main problem with retrospective studies is that people’s ratings of how pleasant or unpleasant they had expected an event to be may resemble how they rate the event after it actually happened not because their expectation was spot on but because the hindsight bias (the tendency to view past or current events as more predictable than they were before they
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occurred, also known as the “I knew it all along effect”) affects their reconstruction of their prior expectations. Cross-sectional studies compare people’s expectations of how they will experience events in the future with how other people actually experience these events at the same time. When researchers use these designs, they ask one group of participants who face a given event about their expectation and another group of participants who have experienced the same or a similar event about their experience. One weakness of cross-sectional designs is that it may be hard to find comparable samples or to optimally match the expected versus experienced events and that error variance due to individual differences may obscure within-individual discrepancies between expectations and experiences.
Accuracy and Biases In general, accurate expectations help people to prepare for events and to adequately respond to events and other people’s behaviors. As shown by research within a functional perspective of Pavlovian conditioning, for instance, the most important outcome of signal learning is not that learners develop responses to conditioned stimuli but rather that their responses to the unconditioned stimuli are optimalized, with aversive stimuli evoking weaker negative responses and appetitive stimuli evoking stronger positive responses. However, a few notable exceptions to the rule that expectations help prepare for reality have been identified. In academic learning situations, for instance, expecting recognition tasks negatively affects memory performance both on recognition and recall tasks. The most plausible explanation seems to be that people view recognition tasks as easier than recall tasks. Even though this perception is accurate to some extent, the overestimation of the difference leads people to invest less effort on the preparation (i.e., the encoding and subsequent rehearsal of stimulus materials) in recognition tasks than in recall tasks. The accuracy of people’s expectations obviously depends on the specific characteristics of the objects of these expectations, of the individuals who hold them, and of the context surrounding the events and behaviors. Despite this variability, however, various tendencies have been identified that generally characterize people’s expectations. One general characteristic of people’s expectations is that in the absence of any information about upcoming experiences, people tend to expect that these experiences will be moderately positive. Ironically, this expectation creates negativity effects. People’s rosy expectations indeed make negative information stand out and seem both more extreme and more informative, thus allowing this information to disproportionally weigh upon their overall evaluations. In the domain of consumer satisfaction, the consequence of the negativity effect is that the mere expectation of having to evaluate products or services renders people’s evaluation more negative by having them focus more than they would spontaneously do on potentially evaluation-relevant information. Expectations about the subjective utility of future outcomes are often characterized by a so-called projection bias. This bias implies that whereas people do realize that their future tastes,
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needs, and circumstances will differ from their present ones, they underestimate the magnitude of this difference. Hence, they overestimate the extent to which future subjective utilities will resemble current subjective utilities. For instance, in a hungry state, people often prefer candy-like snacks (such as chocolate bars and crisps) over fruit snacks (such as apples or bananas). When people choose a snack to consume in a week’s time, their selection therefore depends on whether they expect to consume the snack at a time at which they may reasonably expect to be hungry (e.g., late in the afternoon) versus at a time at which they may reasonably expect not to be hungry (e.g., immediately after lunch). Interestingly, however, people’s predictions also depend on whether they are hungry at the moment they make the choice regardless of whether they may expect to be hungry at the moment of consumption. This finding shows that people project their current situation (and hence the current subjective utility of outcomes) onto the future. The projection bias is closely related to biases in affective forecasting. To the extent that expected utilities are directly related to affective responses to events, it may even be viewed as an affective forecasting bias. Another of these biases is the overestimation of the emotional impact of future events. This so-called impact bias has various causes. First, people tend to think about future events as if these will happen in a vacuum rather than in the midst of many other events and experiences (focalism or the focusing illusion). Second, people fail to appreciate the essentially comparative nature of human judgment. On the one hand, people fail to appreciate how strongly their standards of evaluation may change under the influence of their previous experiences (neglect of change in adaptation level). On the other hand, they fail to appreciate how strongly their judgments will depend on social comparison. Third, people also ignore the extent to which they will psychologically transform the event into something less extremely positive or less extremely negative after it happened (neglect of ordinization and of psychological immune reactions). It should be noted that people not only overestimate the impact of events as compared to the actual impact events generally have, they also overestimate the impact of events as compared to these events’ impact on others. People generally believe that bad things will make them suffer more and that good things will make them happier than others. In the domain of behavioral expectations, people generally underestimate how strongly situational factors will affect other people’s behaviors and particularly how these situational factors will affect their own behaviors. Among the situational influences that people generally underestimate are social influences. People underestimate how strongly others will be affected by a unanimous majority (and hence show behavioral conformism), by an authority (and hence show obedient behavior), or by the mere presence of others (and hence show social facilitation and inhibition). In addition, people’s expectations about future events are generally overoptimistic, both as compared to these events’ objective probabilities (implying that people believe that desirable outcomes are more probable and that undesirable outcomes are less probable than is objectively warranted) and as compared to how they view the probabilities of these events in other people’s future. Apart from expectations about events,
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comparative optimism also characterizes behavioral expectations in that most people believe that they are more likely to perform morally desirable actions in the future than others. The planning fallacy, implying that people underestimate the time they will need to complete projects, may be viewed as an example of overoptimism and comparative optimism at the same time. People indeed underestimate the time they will need to complete projects but do not (or to a lesser extent) underestimate the time other people will need to complete their projects. Despite biases like these, one intriguing characteristic of expectations is that they tend to get validated more frequently than would rationally be warranted. One reason is the confirmation bias (also known as ‘positive test strategy’) that leads people to focus on, overweigh, and selectively search information that confirms their expectations. In addition, expectations guide the interpretation of vague or ambiguous information. The process of selectively seeking and interpreting information results in the apparent confirmation of expectations, a phenomenon that is known as perceptual confirmation. In addition, interpersonal expectations may lead observers to behave in such a manner that they evoke the expected behaviors in those about whom the expectations exist. This phenomenon is known as behavioral confirmation.
Meta-Characteristics Expectations are not only characterized by their contents and their validity. People may hold them with varying degrees of confidence and experience them at varying levels of concreteness and elaboration. Studies on such ‘meta-characteristics’ of expectations have yielded intriguing insights.
Overconfidence and Inferences of Trustworthiness One characteristic of many expectations is that they are held in an overconfident manner. This overconfidence effect implies that people generally overestimate the accuracy of their expectations. In addition, people infer the trustworthiness of other people’s expectations partly from these expectations’ preciseness. For instance, they find communicators more trustworthy if these communicators provide point estimations of probability (i.e., one numerical value) than if they provide interval estimations (i.e., a numerical value accompanied by the range of numerical values between which the probability may vary). This is counternormative because the so-called confidence intervals generally provide more information (namely, by acknowledging the degree of uncertainty surrounding the estimation) and are more likely to be accurate than point estimations.
Abstraction and Temporal Distance One particularly intriguing characteristic of expectations is that their level of abstraction depends on the temporal distance of the expected events or behaviors. The more distant an event or a behavior seems to be in the future the more abstract or high level its construal tends to be in that it includes general, essential, or overarching characteristics. The nearer an event or a
behavior seems to be in the future the more its construal includes contextual, incidental, or concrete details. This apparently simple idea is at the core of construal-level theory. It carries a variety of implications. One implication has to do with how the expected event or the expected behavior itself is conceived of. Expectations about the distant future tend to be simpler, more prototypical, and less diverse than expectations about the near future. In the case of behaviors, it is important to note that behaviors may be described at different levels of abstraction, with trait inferences that are based on them representing the highest level and with mere descriptions of directly observable actions representing the lowest level. Reflecting the more abstract nature of expectations for the distant future than for the near future, people expect that other people’s behaviors in the distant future will depend on these other people’s traits more strongly and hence show a higher cross-situational consistency than other people’s behaviors in the near future. In addition, people’s expectations about the subjective utility of temporally distant events and behaviors mostly depend on these events’ and behaviors’ overarching and central characteristics. In contrast, their expectations about the subjective utility of temporally near events and behaviors also depend on the events’ subordinate and noncentral characteristics. By consequence, changes in evaluation and sometimes even preference reversals may occur as distant events come nearer. A further and counterintuitive implication of the relatively abstract representation of distant events and behaviors has to do with these events’ and behaviors’ subjective probabilities. People are more convinced that their expectations for the distant future will be borne out than they are about their expectations for the near future. Finally, the relative abstractness of future expectations affects the expected variability in them. People expect less variability in the distant future than in the near future. When predicting other individuals’ behaviors, for instance, people expect these others to behave more consistently across situations in the distant future than in the near future.
Cognitive Effects of Expectations The Identification of Behaviors and Events: Assimilation and Contrast Expectations affect the interpretation of information. Their effects have mainly been demonstrated in the field of perception and social judgment. For instance, when observers compare suspects to facial composites, they may expect that a given suspect is guilty (e.g., because witnesses have identified him or her). This expectation can lead them to view a greater similarity between the composite and the suspect, even when they deny that it affects their judgment. Expectations’ effects also occur in other domains, such as visual perception (with context-based expectations affecting the interpretation of ambiguous patterns), the perception of physical symptoms (with the expectation of a physical symptom leading people to interpret any physical experience in terms of that symptom), and the perception of covariation (with the expectation that two variables covary leading people to perceive a nonexistent association or to overestimate an existing association, better known as illusory correlation).
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When expectations affect information processing in such a manner that the cognitive elaboration of (including perception, interpretation, and judgment) events and behaviors or the affective responses to these events and behaviors is distorted in the direction of the expectation, assimilation is said to occur. Assimilation predominantly happens when the incoming information is vague, ambiguous, incomplete, or mixed. In these cases, expectations are used to clarify or disambiguate the information, to fill in the gaps, or to make a choice between conflicting interpretations and conclusions. Contrast effects are said to occur when the cognitive elaboration of an event or behavior is distorted away from the expectation. Such contrast effects predominantly occur when the incoming information is clear and unambiguous and when observers strongly focus on the incoming information (e.g., when they are driven by a strong need for cognition). Because most information is open to interpretation, contrast effects tend to occur less frequently than assimilation effects. Yet, contrast effects have been demonstrated in affective responses. People may be (partly) aware of how their expectations affect their interpretation of incoming information. In these cases, they may try to correct their impressions and responses for the biasing effect of expectations. As a consequence, expectation effects typically occur when people have lowered their defense against them, for example, when they believe that the incoming information is rich enough to overcome undue expectations. When people do try to correct for expectations, on the other hand, overcorrection may sometimes take place. The assimilation effects that would normally occur then give way to contrast effects or vice versa. One consequence of the predominance of assimilation effects is that they help to maintain and even corroborate expectations even in the face of information that objectively contradicts them or that might be construed as contradicting them. For instance, assimilation has been identified as an important factor in stereotype maintenance. When people believe that men are better professors than women, for instance, they may evaluate a lecture given by a man more positively than a lecture given by a woman even if both performed equally well, thus maintaining and even corroborating the stereotype.
Judgment: Expectations as Descriptive and Normative Standards Expectations may sometimes serve as descriptive comparison standards by which observers judge the new information. As such, they may affect the subjective evaluation of events and behaviors as well as affective responses to them. In the domain of consumer psychology, buyers’ satisfaction with products and services depends on the confirmation versus disconfirmation of prior expectations. It does so in an asymmetrical manner, however, with negative disconfirmations particularly strongly predicting dissatisfaction. In the domain of person perception, stereotype-based expectations may serve as standards by which individuals’ abilities, behaviors, and life circumstances are being judged. When differential expectations lead to different standards being applied to different individuals, these expectations may codetermine the subsequent judgments, for instance, group stereotypes may
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give rise to expectations about how group members behave or about the situations in which these members live. Any individual group member’s behavior or situation may then be judged by comparing it to the expectation that is associated with his or her group. When women are expected to show low levels of aggressiveness and men are expected to show higher levels of aggressiveness, for instance, any woman’s aggressiveness is judged by comparing it to a low-aggression standard and any man’s aggressiveness is judged by comparing it to a high-aggression standard. The same behavior may then seem aggressive when shown by a woman (because it is above the normative expectation for women) or as nonaggressive when shown by a man (because it is below the normative expectation for men). Group-specific expectations may create paradoxical consequences in the comparison of above-average members of a group that is expected to score low on a given dimension and below-average members of a group that is expected to score high on the same dimension. The former individuals may then be judged to score higher on the dimension than the latter individuals do, even if their score is objectively lower. For instance, women who behave more aggressively than expectations for women would predict may be judged as behaving more aggressively than men who behave less aggressively than expectations for men would predict even if by any objective standards the women’s behavior is less aggressive than the men’s. Apart from serving as descriptive standards, it should be noted that expectations may also serve as normative comparison standards. This is particularly evident in the case of behavioral expectations, with expectation-confirming behaviors being judged as normal and appropriate and with expectation-disconfirming behaviors meeting with disapproval. For instance, the expectation that women behave less aggressively than men may give rise to the normative prescription that women should behave nonaggressively and that men should behave aggressively. A woman behaving aggressively and a man behaving nonaggressively may then be socially sanctioned.
Causal Attribution When their expectations are contradicted, people are more likely to engage in causal thinking than when their expectations are met. Unexpected events or behaviors thus evoke more causal attribution than expected events and behaviors. This particularly holds true for events and behaviors that depart from the prior expectations in an undesirable sense. In this case, causal reasoning often takes the form of counterfactual reasoning contrasting alternative series of events to what has actually happened (‘what if . . .’). One implication of the effect of expectations on causal reasoning is that the extent to which people causally explain events or behaviors reveals to some extent whether they had expected these events or behaviors. Within this context, for instance, the notion ‘stereotypic explanatory bias’ has been coined to describe the relative tendency to explain stereotypeinconsistent behaviors and to leave stereotype-consistent behaviors unexplained. The stereotypic explanatory bias has been at the basis of the development of a measure of stereotypes that does not require asking people about their stereotype-based
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expectations (a so-called indirect or implicit measure of expectations). Like other indirect measures, it is particularly useful to avoid the social desirability concerns that often plague selfreport measurements.
Recognition and Recall In apparent contrast with the finding that expectationinconsistent information tends either to get overlooked or to get distorted, memory is generally better for expectationinconsistent information than for expectation-consistent information. This finding holds both for recall and recognition measures. The sole exception consists of recognition measures that are not corrected for response tendencies. Probably due to guessing strategies, these measures show an advantage for expectation-consistent information above expectationinconsistent information. The advantage for expectationinconsistent information that all other measures reveal seems to be due to expectation-inconsistent information being processed in a deeper or more elaborate manner than expectationconsistent information.
Expectations and Verbal Communication Apart from affecting the perception of expected and nonexpected events and behaviors, expectations may affect how observers communicate about these events and behaviors. As compared to nonexpected behaviors, people tend to describe expected behaviors in more abstract terms (the linguistic expectancy bias). One measurement of the abstractness of a description hinges on the verbs and adjectives being used, with descriptive action verbs (describing an observable overt behavior, usually implying an invariant physical element) representing the most concrete level and with adjectives representing the most abstract levels. The intermediate levels are represented by interpretative action verbs (describing a broader semantic category to which an observable overt behavior belongs) and state verbs (describing internal states) and, in some conceptualizations, by mixed types of verbs. Imagine, for instance, that an observer views a female passer-by slap a male soccer hooligan. The observer may describe the incident as ‘she slapped him’ (descriptive action verb), ‘she abused him’ (interpretative action verb), ‘she hates him’ (state verb), or ‘she is aggressive’ (adjective). Interestingly, the more the observer had expected the behavior the more abstract his or her description generally is. In the example described previously, the observer is more likely to use concrete verbs to describe the scene than if he or she had viewed a male soccer hooligan slapping a female passer-by. The effect of expectations on verbal communication is important because it facilitates the interindividual spreading of expectations. As compared to concrete descriptions, abstract descriptions do not only communicate that the speaker or writer expected the event. On an implicit level, it also suggests that the listener or reader should in turn expect the behavior. Interestingly, the more abstract a description is the more evidence it seems to be based on. As compared to communication about unexpected behaviors, therefore, communication
about expected behaviors suggests that it is based on a larger informational basis. In addition, abstract descriptions are harder to verify or to falsify than concrete descriptions are. Whenever a message refers to a directly observable behavior, readers or listeners may easily determine whether it is truthful or not. If, in contrast, a message refers to a broader semantic category of behaviors, nonobservable behaviors, or personality characteristics, it is much more difficult for readers and listeners to prove that it is true or that it is false. Because people generally assume that interpersonal messages are truthful unless proven otherwise, communications about expected behaviors thus get accepted more easily (because it is more difficult to falsify them) than communications about nonexpected behaviors do. Apart from affecting the verbalization of behaviors, expectations may also affect how listeners or readers decode verbally described events and behaviors. This effect is particularly well documented in the case of natural language quantifiers such as the ones that are used to verbally describe probabilities. A word like ‘probable’ may be interpreted as denoting different probabilities depending on whether it is used to describe events that a priori seem likely versus to describe events that a priori seem unlikely. For instance, the statement that ‘it will probably rain tomorrow’ may be interpreted by listeners or readers as denoting a much higher likelihood when the forecast is about the weather in Belgium than when it is about the weather in California.
Expectations Affect Reality Perhaps the most intriguing characteristic of expectations is that they may make themselves come true. Among the best known manifestations of this phenomenon is the treatment belief effect (better known as the placebo effect) that is said to occur when the expectation that a treatment will work in itself induces improvement. However, expectations affect reality in a variety of other situations as well. Interpersonal expectations sometimes lead observers to behave in such a manner that they encourage or even evoke the expected behaviors or performances in others. One well-known example of such interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies is the so-called Pygmalion effect, indicating that individuals about whom high expectations exist do show an improved performance. The Pygmalion effect has been extensively studied in the context of teacher expectations, with the scientific consensus presently being that teacher expectations do affect pupil performance in a robust manner yet to a typically small extent. Yet, self-fulfilling prophecies are also involved in demand effects (also known as experimenter bias, occurring when an experimenter evokes the expected behaviors in participants) in studies with both human and animal participants. One particularly intriguing manifestation of a self-fulfilling prophecy is stereotype threat. This phenomenon occurs when a negative stereotype evokes a stereotype-consistent bad performance in members of the stereotyped group. In order for it to occur, a set of conditions must be met. First, group members must be aware of the negative stereotype that exists about their social group (e.g., women must be aware of the stereotype saying that women are worse at mathematics than men are).
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Second, their group membership must be salient, either because it chronically is or because situational cues draw the group members’ attention to it (e.g., women having heard sexist jokes or having seen sexist commercials). Third, group members must be aware of the fact that the task at hand calls on the ability that their group supposedly lacks (e.g., women knowing that a test they take measures mathematical ability). Fourth and finally, the relevant achievement domain must be personally important to them (e.g., women who wish to pursue a career in mathematics). When these conditions are met, group members may underachieve as compared to a situation in which they are not met and as compared to other groups. The opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy is a self-defeating prophecy or an expectation that falsifies itself. Self-defeating prophecies have been studied less intensely than self-fulfilling prophecies. One example of how expectations may both validate and falsify themselves is to be found in the domain of affective expectations. These expectations affect actual emotional experience such that either assimilation effects (with the actual experience being more similar to the expected one than if the expectation had not existed) or contrast effects (with the actual experience being more dissimilar to the expected one than if the expectation had not existed) may occur.
Conclusion Expectations are ubiquitous in human behavior. The frequently occurring impression that one’s expectations are borne out may be due, at least in part, to the sometimes distorting effects of expectations on behavioral, affective, and cognitive processes. However, the mere existence of successful instrumental and classical learning processes reveals that people can and do develop adequate expectations.
See also: Classical Conditioning; Hope and Optimism; Intention; Motivation; Operant Conditioning; Planning; Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotypes (Racial Bias); Self-Efficacy; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy;
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Social Loafing (and Facilitation); Social Values (Influence on Behavior); Surprise; Uncertainty.
Further Reading Armor DA and Taylor SE (1998) Situated optimism: Specific outcome expectancies and self-regulation. In: Zanna MP (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 30, pp. 309–379. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Buehler R, Griffin D, and Peetz J (2010) The planning fallacy: Cognitive, motivational, and social origins. In: Zanna MP and Olsen JM (eds.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 43, pp. 1–62. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Domjan M (2005) Pavlovian conditioning: A functional perspective. Annual Review of Psychology 56: 179–206. Dunning D, Griffin D, Milojokovic JD, and Ross L (1990) The overconfidence effect in social prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 568–581. Geers AL and Lassiter GD (1999) Affective expectations and information gain: Evidence for assimilation and contrast effects in affective experience. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35: 394–413. Jussim L and Harber KD (2005) Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved, and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review 9: 131–155. Kahneman D and Tversky A (1979) Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291. Miller DT and Turnbull W (1986) Expectancies and interpersonal processes. Annual Review of Psychology 37: 233–256. Ross L, Lepper MR, Strack F, and Steinmetz J (1977) Social explanation and social expectation: Effects of real and hypothetical explanations on subjective likelihood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35: 817–829. Stangor C and McMillan D (1992) Memory for expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information: A review of the social and social developmental literatures. Psychological Bulletin 111: 42–61. Stewart-Williams S and Podd J (2004) The placebo effect: Dissolving the expectancy versus conditioning debate. Psychological Bulletin 130: 324–340. Trope Y and Liberman N (2003) Temporal construal. Psychological Review 110: 403–421. Weinstein ND (1980) Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39: 806–820. Wigfield A and Cambria J (2010) Expectancy-value theory: Retrospective and prospective. In: Urdan TC and Karabenick SA (eds.) The Decade Ahead: Theoretical Perspectives on Motivation and Achievement. Advances in Motivation and Achievement, vol. 16A, pp. 35–70. Bingley: Emerald Group. Wilson TD and Gilbert DT (2003) Affective forecasting. In: Zanna MP (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 35, pp. 345–411. New York: Elsevier.
Glossary Affective forecasting The prediction of one’s future moods and emotions. Comparative optimism The belief that one’s future will be better than the future of other people or of the average individual. Confirmation bias The tendency to selectively search or focus on information that is consistent with one’s prior expectation. Expectancy-value model A model that describes human motivation as a function of people’s beliefs about the likelihood that actions will create outcomes and about the subjective value or utility these people associate with the relevant outcomes. Expected utility The expected subjective value of an outcome.
Definition and Types of Expectations An expectation is a belief about events or behaviors that will occur or that will be revealed in the future. The objects of eventrelated expectations may be identifiable events (specific expectations, e.g., about an economic recession, about good weather), life in general, or the future in general (generalized expectations, e.g., about whether the future will be pleasant or unpleasant, or about whether important outcomes are generally controllable or uncontrollable). The objects of behavioral expectations may be overt behaviors (e.g., giving money to charity, attending a class) or covert behaviors (e.g., feeling happy, needing company) shown by the individuals who hold the expectations themselves or by third persons. Behavioral expectations about the self need to be distinguished from other types of future-oriented thinking, such as aspirations, wishes, behavioral intentions, and fantasies. Aspirations and wishes are the goals people hope to achieve rather than the goals they believe they will achieve. Behavioral intentions concern the actions people decide they will undertake rather than the actions they believe they will undertake. In fantasies, people pretend that something happens or that they perform some action rather than believe that it will truly happen or that they will perform it. Expectations may occur in relationship to various aspects of events or behaviors, such as these events’ or behaviors’ nature, their likelihood (i.e., the events’ or behaviors’ subjective probability or likelihood), their subjective value (i.e., the events’ or behaviors’ predicted or expected [subjective] utility), their consequences, or their duration. All these expectations may be either purely descriptive or normative. Descriptive expectations merely state what, according to the individual holding these expectations, will happen or will be revealed. Normative expectations
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Linguistic expectancy bias The tendency to describe expected behaviors in more abstract terms than unexpected behaviors. Overconfidence effect An unwarrantedly strong confidence in the accuracy of one’s own predictions. Self-defeating prophecy An expectation that affects the holder’s behavior in such a manner that this very behavior prevents the expectation from coming true. Self-fulfilling prophecy An expectation that affects the holder’s behavior in such a manner that this very behavior makes the expectation come true. Stereotype threat The unfavorable effect on an individual’s performance of this individual’s awareness of a negative stereotype about his or her group in the relevant performance domain. Subjective probability The perception of the likelihood by which an event or behavior will occur.
also state what, according to the individual holding them will happen yet with the prescriptive connotation that for logical, social, or moral reasons it should happen. Normative expectations are therefore closely related to norms.
Role of Expectations in Human Behavior Expectations are involved in almost any kind of human behavior. They play a particularly important role in learning, motivation, decision-making, affective responding, and social interaction.
Learning Signal learning, the prototypical form of classical conditioning, implies learning that the occurrence of a mundane stimulus predicts the subsequent occurrence of another, more meaningful stimulus. Instrumental or operant learning implies learning to expect rewards or punishments for specific behaviors. Signal learning also gives rise to generalized expectations about the predictability of important events, while operant learning gives rise to generalized expectations of controllability. Both generalized expectations have even been shown to crucially affect the well-being of both humans and animals. For instance, at the core of the learned helplessness phenomenon lies a generalized expectation of not being able to control important events in the future.
Motivation The central role of expectations in behavior is also reflected in so-called expectancy-value models of motivation that assume
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that people make choices on the basis of the subjective expectancy of attaining (or not attaining) given outcomes through a behavioral choice and of the value they place on attaining (or not attaining) these outcomes. The individual’s motivation to show some behavior depends on the multiplication of these two factors. Some famous expectancy-value models of behavior are Tolman’s expectancy theory, Eccles’ expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation, and Pekrun’s controlvalue model.
Decision-Making People make decisions based on their expectations both concerning their future preferences, tastes, feelings, and needs and concerning the likelihood of events, situations, and behavioral outcomes. One theory that formalizes the role of expectations in decision-making is prospect theory. This theory states that people choose between behavioral options on the basis of the expected subjective utility of each alternative’s outcome weighed by the subjective probability of these outcomes. An outcome is conceived of as a change relative to a reference point (i.e., as a loss or a gain) rather than as a state. The subjective utility of an outcome therefore depends on both the reference point and on the magnitude and the direction of the change. However, not all differences between outcomes are created equal. The further away two outcomes are from the reference point, the smaller the difference in subjective utility between them normally is. For instance, the difference between gaining $5 and gaining $10 ‘feels’ larger (in more formal terms: corresponds to a greater difference in subjective utility) than the difference between gaining $50 and gaining $55. The expected subjective utility of a loss or gain is a function of the outcome’s subjective utility adjusted for temporal distance. The more distant an outcome seems, the weaker its positive or negative value is (temporal discounting). Having to wait some time for a pleasant outcome renders that outcome less attractive than knowing that the outcome will arrive any moment. Similarly, knowing that an unpleasant outcome will only happen after some time renders it less aversive than knowing that it will arrive any moment. However, temporal discounting is generally steeper for losses than for gains. Postponing an unpleasant outcome reduces its expected aversiveness to a larger extent than postponing a pleasant outcome reduces its expected attractiveness. By consequence, outcomes that carry both advantages and disadvantages (i.e., outcomes that may be viewed as gains in some respects but as losses in other respects) often seem more attractive (or less unattractive) when they are envisioned in the distant future than when they are envisioned in the near future. This phenomenon may give rise to preference reversals, with one option seeming more attractive than another at some point in time (e.g., with the prospect of helping a friend move some weekend next spring seems more attractive than spending that weekend reading on the beach) but becoming less attractive as the relevant event comes nearer (e.g., with the prospect of spending the weekend reading on the beach becoming more attractive than helping the friend move on the Friday before it is all supposed to happen). Apart from expected utilities, the subjective probabilities or the expected likelihoods of events and behaviors also affect
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decision-making. Various biases occur in people’s estimation of these likelihoods. For instance, people tend to overestimate small likelihoods and underestimate high likelihoods. They also associate higher likelihoods with desirable outcomes than with undesirable outcomes and lower likelihoods with undesirable outcomes than with desirable outcomes. At the same time, people seem to be quite able to produce accurate estimates of likelihoods. In general, it seems that people are better able to estimate likelihoods when they are allowed to do so in a format that they would spontaneously use (e.g., by estimating frequencies of occurrence) than when they are forced to use a nonspontaneously used format (e.g., by estimating probabilities).
Affect In the domain of moods and feelings, it is generally believed that affective responses to events and behaviors sometimes depend on people’s expectations about how these events or behaviors will make them feel and on how their actual experiences depart from their expectations (cf. the affective expectation model). According to the affective expectation model, both assimilation and contrast effects may occur. People’s affective responses to an event or a behavior may be assimilated to these people’s prior expectations about how they will feel if the stimulus information they perceive does not differ too much from the stimulus information they expected. In these cases, people’s affective reactions resemble the affective reactions they had expected more than they would have done without the relevant expectations. For instance, an audience may have more fun viewing a moderately funny movie when this audience had previously expected to see a funny movie (and hence to have fun) than when the audience had expected to see a not-so-funny movie. If, however, the stimulus information so strongly departs from the expected information that the discrepancy gets noticed, contrast effects occur. In these cases, people’s affective reactions differ from the affective reactions they had expected more than they would have done without the relevant expectations. For instance, an audience may have less fun viewing a moderately funny movie when this audience had previously expected to see a wildly funny movie (and hence to have tremendous fun) and when the audience notices that the movie departs from this expectation than when the audience had expected to see a not-so-funny movie. This view that expectations influence affective reactions is at the basis of various models of consumer satisfaction in which satisfaction is believed to be a function of the confirmation versus disconfirmation of expectations. These models generally indicate that consumer satisfaction is highest when prior expectations are surpassed and lowest when expectations remain unfulfilled. As such, setting rather low expectation standards may, to some extent, enhance consumer satisfaction, whereas setting high expectation standards may reduce it.
Social Interaction People’s behavioral choices in interdependence situations are affected by their expectations about how the others involved will behave. Interdependence situations occur in group settings when the outcomes of group members’ behaviors depend on
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how the other group members behave so that each group member affects and is affected by others. For instance, when students work together on a group project, each student’s efforts may contribute toward a good grade, yet whether or not the effort of this individual student will ultimately prove useful depends on the work of the other students in the group as well. In interdependence situations like these, expectations about the behaviors of others may affect behavior in various directions. When people share a common good, the expectation that others’ contributions will be sufficient to build and maintain the common good may lead them to consume from the common good without contributing to it (free riding). Similarly, when people work on a group task, the expectation that others will work sufficiently hard sometimes leads them to invest less effort (social loafing). Ironically, the expectation that others will insufficiently contribute may also inhibit contributions out of fear of being taken advantage of. Only in specific cases (usually implying strong group cohesiveness) will the expectation that others will perform poorly or not contribute induce harder work and larger contributions (social compensation).
Sources Expectations about events may derive from an individual’s previous experiences with the relevant events or with similar events. They may also be based on verbal or numerical information individuals receive about other people’s experiences or even on their purely cognitive constructions or intuitive rulesof-thumb (named heuristics). To estimate events’ likelihoods, for instance, people may use statistical information to some extent. However, they also apply heuristics such as the availability heuristic (if I can easily remember or imagine examples of it, it must be likely). Moreover, people sometimes judge an event’s likelihood on the basis of whether they can figure a mechanism or scenario leading up to the event. One consequence is that when people are able to causally explain why given events might occur, their likelihood estimates for these events may be enhanced. This effect occurs even when people are aware of the fact that the events they have just explained were purely hypothetical. Similarly, interpersonal behavioral expectations may derive from the observer’s previous experience with the actors (the individuals whose behaviors are being predicted) as well as from implicit personality theories, stereotypes (including those associated with social roles), and projection from the observer’s own behaviors. For instance, an individual’s social values (e.g., individualism, competitiveness, altruism) have been shown to predict the social values according to which he or she expects others to behave in interdependence situations. Because people possess an unequalled basis of knowledge about their own overt and covert behaviors as compared to what they know about others, it would seem that their expectations about their own behaviors depend on their actual experiences rather than on stereotypes or on intuitive theories of personality and affect. Yet, it seems that even self-related expectations are based on theories and stereotypes. For instance, women may expect to experience mood swings caused by their hormone cycle because they have heard about the emotional effects of hormone-level changes on women.
Even if people process information without any prior expectations to guide them, expectations that arise online (i.e., while people are encoding the incoming information) may affect their interpretation of subsequent information elements. For instance, when people receive a variety of information about some other individual, the behaviors or personal characteristics that they encounter first may create an initial impression. This initial impression then serves as an expectation about the individual’s other behaviors and characteristics. The primacy effect (i.e., the phenomenon that initial information weighs relatively heavily on general impressions) is a case in point. One situation in which a primacy effect may occur is when emerging expectations lead people to interpret subsequent elements in a manner that is partial to their first impression.
Measurement Expectations are typically studied by asking people about them. Participants in studies are invited to verbally describe (either in their own words or, more frequently, using rating scales) what they think will happen or what they or others will do, how pleasant or unpleasant they think these future events or behaviors will be to them or to others, how likely they believe the events or behaviors are, or how long they think events or behaviors will last. The main problem with this approach is that verbal self-descriptions are vulnerable to selfpresentation tendencies (including social desirability). When researchers use rating scales to facilitate participants’ responding, their approach is also vulnerable to issues surrounding scale interpretation. People may differ in how they interpret specific response alternatives and hence how they view scale ranges. In addition, these interpretations may change over time. The latter problem is particularly troublesome in prospective studies on the accuracy of expectations. In prospective studies about how well people’s expectations match their actual experiences, researchers ask participants about the events or behaviors they expect. Later on, they either ask participants about the events or behaviors that have actually occurred or collect external data concerning the occurrence of these events or behaviors. To the extent that their original ratings differ from their later ratings, the expectation is said to have been inaccurate. Yet, participants’ ratings may differ not because their expectations were off the mark but because these participants’ scale use has changed. For instance, maturation may have taught them not to use extreme response alternatives lightly. In retrospective studies about how well people’s expectations match their actual experiences, researchers either ask participants about events or behaviors that have actually occurred or collect external data about the occurrence of these events or behaviors. They then ask participants about what they had expected concerning these events or behaviors. The main problem with retrospective studies is that people’s ratings of how pleasant or unpleasant they had expected an event to be may resemble how they rate the event after it actually happened not because their expectation was spot on but because the hindsight bias (the tendency to view past or current events as more predictable than they were before they
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occurred, also known as the “I knew it all along effect”) affects their reconstruction of their prior expectations. Cross-sectional studies compare people’s expectations of how they will experience events in the future with how other people actually experience these events at the same time. When researchers use these designs, they ask one group of participants who face a given event about their expectation and another group of participants who have experienced the same or a similar event about their experience. One weakness of cross-sectional designs is that it may be hard to find comparable samples or to optimally match the expected versus experienced events and that error variance due to individual differences may obscure within-individual discrepancies between expectations and experiences.
Accuracy and Biases In general, accurate expectations help people to prepare for events and to adequately respond to events and other people’s behaviors. As shown by research within a functional perspective of Pavlovian conditioning, for instance, the most important outcome of signal learning is not that learners develop responses to conditioned stimuli but rather that their responses to the unconditioned stimuli are optimalized, with aversive stimuli evoking weaker negative responses and appetitive stimuli evoking stronger positive responses. However, a few notable exceptions to the rule that expectations help prepare for reality have been identified. In academic learning situations, for instance, expecting recognition tasks negatively affects memory performance both on recognition and recall tasks. The most plausible explanation seems to be that people view recognition tasks as easier than recall tasks. Even though this perception is accurate to some extent, the overestimation of the difference leads people to invest less effort on the preparation (i.e., the encoding and subsequent rehearsal of stimulus materials) in recognition tasks than in recall tasks. The accuracy of people’s expectations obviously depends on the specific characteristics of the objects of these expectations, of the individuals who hold them, and of the context surrounding the events and behaviors. Despite this variability, however, various tendencies have been identified that generally characterize people’s expectations. One general characteristic of people’s expectations is that in the absence of any information about upcoming experiences, people tend to expect that these experiences will be moderately positive. Ironically, this expectation creates negativity effects. People’s rosy expectations indeed make negative information stand out and seem both more extreme and more informative, thus allowing this information to disproportionally weigh upon their overall evaluations. In the domain of consumer satisfaction, the consequence of the negativity effect is that the mere expectation of having to evaluate products or services renders people’s evaluation more negative by having them focus more than they would spontaneously do on potentially evaluation-relevant information. Expectations about the subjective utility of future outcomes are often characterized by a so-called projection bias. This bias implies that whereas people do realize that their future tastes,
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needs, and circumstances will differ from their present ones, they underestimate the magnitude of this difference. Hence, they overestimate the extent to which future subjective utilities will resemble current subjective utilities. For instance, in a hungry state, people often prefer candy-like snacks (such as chocolate bars and crisps) over fruit snacks (such as apples or bananas). When people choose a snack to consume in a week’s time, their selection therefore depends on whether they expect to consume the snack at a time at which they may reasonably expect to be hungry (e.g., late in the afternoon) versus at a time at which they may reasonably expect not to be hungry (e.g., immediately after lunch). Interestingly, however, people’s predictions also depend on whether they are hungry at the moment they make the choice regardless of whether they may expect to be hungry at the moment of consumption. This finding shows that people project their current situation (and hence the current subjective utility of outcomes) onto the future. The projection bias is closely related to biases in affective forecasting. To the extent that expected utilities are directly related to affective responses to events, it may even be viewed as an affective forecasting bias. Another of these biases is the overestimation of the emotional impact of future events. This so-called impact bias has various causes. First, people tend to think about future events as if these will happen in a vacuum rather than in the midst of many other events and experiences (focalism or the focusing illusion). Second, people fail to appreciate the essentially comparative nature of human judgment. On the one hand, people fail to appreciate how strongly their standards of evaluation may change under the influence of their previous experiences (neglect of change in adaptation level). On the other hand, they fail to appreciate how strongly their judgments will depend on social comparison. Third, people also ignore the extent to which they will psychologically transform the event into something less extremely positive or less extremely negative after it happened (neglect of ordinization and of psychological immune reactions). It should be noted that people not only overestimate the impact of events as compared to the actual impact events generally have, they also overestimate the impact of events as compared to these events’ impact on others. People generally believe that bad things will make them suffer more and that good things will make them happier than others. In the domain of behavioral expectations, people generally underestimate how strongly situational factors will affect other people’s behaviors and particularly how these situational factors will affect their own behaviors. Among the situational influences that people generally underestimate are social influences. People underestimate how strongly others will be affected by a unanimous majority (and hence show behavioral conformism), by an authority (and hence show obedient behavior), or by the mere presence of others (and hence show social facilitation and inhibition). In addition, people’s expectations about future events are generally overoptimistic, both as compared to these events’ objective probabilities (implying that people believe that desirable outcomes are more probable and that undesirable outcomes are less probable than is objectively warranted) and as compared to how they view the probabilities of these events in other people’s future. Apart from expectations about events,
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comparative optimism also characterizes behavioral expectations in that most people believe that they are more likely to perform morally desirable actions in the future than others. The planning fallacy, implying that people underestimate the time they will need to complete projects, may be viewed as an example of overoptimism and comparative optimism at the same time. People indeed underestimate the time they will need to complete projects but do not (or to a lesser extent) underestimate the time other people will need to complete their projects. Despite biases like these, one intriguing characteristic of expectations is that they tend to get validated more frequently than would rationally be warranted. One reason is the confirmation bias (also known as ‘positive test strategy’) that leads people to focus on, overweigh, and selectively search information that confirms their expectations. In addition, expectations guide the interpretation of vague or ambiguous information. The process of selectively seeking and interpreting information results in the apparent confirmation of expectations, a phenomenon that is known as perceptual confirmation. In addition, interpersonal expectations may lead observers to behave in such a manner that they evoke the expected behaviors in those about whom the expectations exist. This phenomenon is known as behavioral confirmation.
Meta-Characteristics Expectations are not only characterized by their contents and their validity. People may hold them with varying degrees of confidence and experience them at varying levels of concreteness and elaboration. Studies on such ‘meta-characteristics’ of expectations have yielded intriguing insights.
Overconfidence and Inferences of Trustworthiness One characteristic of many expectations is that they are held in an overconfident manner. This overconfidence effect implies that people generally overestimate the accuracy of their expectations. In addition, people infer the trustworthiness of other people’s expectations partly from these expectations’ preciseness. For instance, they find communicators more trustworthy if these communicators provide point estimations of probability (i.e., one numerical value) than if they provide interval estimations (i.e., a numerical value accompanied by the range of numerical values between which the probability may vary). This is counternormative because the so-called confidence intervals generally provide more information (namely, by acknowledging the degree of uncertainty surrounding the estimation) and are more likely to be accurate than point estimations.
Abstraction and Temporal Distance One particularly intriguing characteristic of expectations is that their level of abstraction depends on the temporal distance of the expected events or behaviors. The more distant an event or a behavior seems to be in the future the more abstract or high level its construal tends to be in that it includes general, essential, or overarching characteristics. The nearer an event or a
behavior seems to be in the future the more its construal includes contextual, incidental, or concrete details. This apparently simple idea is at the core of construal-level theory. It carries a variety of implications. One implication has to do with how the expected event or the expected behavior itself is conceived of. Expectations about the distant future tend to be simpler, more prototypical, and less diverse than expectations about the near future. In the case of behaviors, it is important to note that behaviors may be described at different levels of abstraction, with trait inferences that are based on them representing the highest level and with mere descriptions of directly observable actions representing the lowest level. Reflecting the more abstract nature of expectations for the distant future than for the near future, people expect that other people’s behaviors in the distant future will depend on these other people’s traits more strongly and hence show a higher cross-situational consistency than other people’s behaviors in the near future. In addition, people’s expectations about the subjective utility of temporally distant events and behaviors mostly depend on these events’ and behaviors’ overarching and central characteristics. In contrast, their expectations about the subjective utility of temporally near events and behaviors also depend on the events’ subordinate and noncentral characteristics. By consequence, changes in evaluation and sometimes even preference reversals may occur as distant events come nearer. A further and counterintuitive implication of the relatively abstract representation of distant events and behaviors has to do with these events’ and behaviors’ subjective probabilities. People are more convinced that their expectations for the distant future will be borne out than they are about their expectations for the near future. Finally, the relative abstractness of future expectations affects the expected variability in them. People expect less variability in the distant future than in the near future. When predicting other individuals’ behaviors, for instance, people expect these others to behave more consistently across situations in the distant future than in the near future.
Cognitive Effects of Expectations The Identification of Behaviors and Events: Assimilation and Contrast Expectations affect the interpretation of information. Their effects have mainly been demonstrated in the field of perception and social judgment. For instance, when observers compare suspects to facial composites, they may expect that a given suspect is guilty (e.g., because witnesses have identified him or her). This expectation can lead them to view a greater similarity between the composite and the suspect, even when they deny that it affects their judgment. Expectations’ effects also occur in other domains, such as visual perception (with context-based expectations affecting the interpretation of ambiguous patterns), the perception of physical symptoms (with the expectation of a physical symptom leading people to interpret any physical experience in terms of that symptom), and the perception of covariation (with the expectation that two variables covary leading people to perceive a nonexistent association or to overestimate an existing association, better known as illusory correlation).
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When expectations affect information processing in such a manner that the cognitive elaboration of (including perception, interpretation, and judgment) events and behaviors or the affective responses to these events and behaviors is distorted in the direction of the expectation, assimilation is said to occur. Assimilation predominantly happens when the incoming information is vague, ambiguous, incomplete, or mixed. In these cases, expectations are used to clarify or disambiguate the information, to fill in the gaps, or to make a choice between conflicting interpretations and conclusions. Contrast effects are said to occur when the cognitive elaboration of an event or behavior is distorted away from the expectation. Such contrast effects predominantly occur when the incoming information is clear and unambiguous and when observers strongly focus on the incoming information (e.g., when they are driven by a strong need for cognition). Because most information is open to interpretation, contrast effects tend to occur less frequently than assimilation effects. Yet, contrast effects have been demonstrated in affective responses. People may be (partly) aware of how their expectations affect their interpretation of incoming information. In these cases, they may try to correct their impressions and responses for the biasing effect of expectations. As a consequence, expectation effects typically occur when people have lowered their defense against them, for example, when they believe that the incoming information is rich enough to overcome undue expectations. When people do try to correct for expectations, on the other hand, overcorrection may sometimes take place. The assimilation effects that would normally occur then give way to contrast effects or vice versa. One consequence of the predominance of assimilation effects is that they help to maintain and even corroborate expectations even in the face of information that objectively contradicts them or that might be construed as contradicting them. For instance, assimilation has been identified as an important factor in stereotype maintenance. When people believe that men are better professors than women, for instance, they may evaluate a lecture given by a man more positively than a lecture given by a woman even if both performed equally well, thus maintaining and even corroborating the stereotype.
Judgment: Expectations as Descriptive and Normative Standards Expectations may sometimes serve as descriptive comparison standards by which observers judge the new information. As such, they may affect the subjective evaluation of events and behaviors as well as affective responses to them. In the domain of consumer psychology, buyers’ satisfaction with products and services depends on the confirmation versus disconfirmation of prior expectations. It does so in an asymmetrical manner, however, with negative disconfirmations particularly strongly predicting dissatisfaction. In the domain of person perception, stereotype-based expectations may serve as standards by which individuals’ abilities, behaviors, and life circumstances are being judged. When differential expectations lead to different standards being applied to different individuals, these expectations may codetermine the subsequent judgments, for instance, group stereotypes may
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give rise to expectations about how group members behave or about the situations in which these members live. Any individual group member’s behavior or situation may then be judged by comparing it to the expectation that is associated with his or her group. When women are expected to show low levels of aggressiveness and men are expected to show higher levels of aggressiveness, for instance, any woman’s aggressiveness is judged by comparing it to a low-aggression standard and any man’s aggressiveness is judged by comparing it to a high-aggression standard. The same behavior may then seem aggressive when shown by a woman (because it is above the normative expectation for women) or as nonaggressive when shown by a man (because it is below the normative expectation for men). Group-specific expectations may create paradoxical consequences in the comparison of above-average members of a group that is expected to score low on a given dimension and below-average members of a group that is expected to score high on the same dimension. The former individuals may then be judged to score higher on the dimension than the latter individuals do, even if their score is objectively lower. For instance, women who behave more aggressively than expectations for women would predict may be judged as behaving more aggressively than men who behave less aggressively than expectations for men would predict even if by any objective standards the women’s behavior is less aggressive than the men’s. Apart from serving as descriptive standards, it should be noted that expectations may also serve as normative comparison standards. This is particularly evident in the case of behavioral expectations, with expectation-confirming behaviors being judged as normal and appropriate and with expectation-disconfirming behaviors meeting with disapproval. For instance, the expectation that women behave less aggressively than men may give rise to the normative prescription that women should behave nonaggressively and that men should behave aggressively. A woman behaving aggressively and a man behaving nonaggressively may then be socially sanctioned.
Causal Attribution When their expectations are contradicted, people are more likely to engage in causal thinking than when their expectations are met. Unexpected events or behaviors thus evoke more causal attribution than expected events and behaviors. This particularly holds true for events and behaviors that depart from the prior expectations in an undesirable sense. In this case, causal reasoning often takes the form of counterfactual reasoning contrasting alternative series of events to what has actually happened (‘what if . . .’). One implication of the effect of expectations on causal reasoning is that the extent to which people causally explain events or behaviors reveals to some extent whether they had expected these events or behaviors. Within this context, for instance, the notion ‘stereotypic explanatory bias’ has been coined to describe the relative tendency to explain stereotypeinconsistent behaviors and to leave stereotype-consistent behaviors unexplained. The stereotypic explanatory bias has been at the basis of the development of a measure of stereotypes that does not require asking people about their stereotype-based
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expectations (a so-called indirect or implicit measure of expectations). Like other indirect measures, it is particularly useful to avoid the social desirability concerns that often plague selfreport measurements.
Recognition and Recall In apparent contrast with the finding that expectationinconsistent information tends either to get overlooked or to get distorted, memory is generally better for expectationinconsistent information than for expectation-consistent information. This finding holds both for recall and recognition measures. The sole exception consists of recognition measures that are not corrected for response tendencies. Probably due to guessing strategies, these measures show an advantage for expectation-consistent information above expectationinconsistent information. The advantage for expectationinconsistent information that all other measures reveal seems to be due to expectation-inconsistent information being processed in a deeper or more elaborate manner than expectationconsistent information.
Expectations and Verbal Communication Apart from affecting the perception of expected and nonexpected events and behaviors, expectations may affect how observers communicate about these events and behaviors. As compared to nonexpected behaviors, people tend to describe expected behaviors in more abstract terms (the linguistic expectancy bias). One measurement of the abstractness of a description hinges on the verbs and adjectives being used, with descriptive action verbs (describing an observable overt behavior, usually implying an invariant physical element) representing the most concrete level and with adjectives representing the most abstract levels. The intermediate levels are represented by interpretative action verbs (describing a broader semantic category to which an observable overt behavior belongs) and state verbs (describing internal states) and, in some conceptualizations, by mixed types of verbs. Imagine, for instance, that an observer views a female passer-by slap a male soccer hooligan. The observer may describe the incident as ‘she slapped him’ (descriptive action verb), ‘she abused him’ (interpretative action verb), ‘she hates him’ (state verb), or ‘she is aggressive’ (adjective). Interestingly, the more the observer had expected the behavior the more abstract his or her description generally is. In the example described previously, the observer is more likely to use concrete verbs to describe the scene than if he or she had viewed a male soccer hooligan slapping a female passer-by. The effect of expectations on verbal communication is important because it facilitates the interindividual spreading of expectations. As compared to concrete descriptions, abstract descriptions do not only communicate that the speaker or writer expected the event. On an implicit level, it also suggests that the listener or reader should in turn expect the behavior. Interestingly, the more abstract a description is the more evidence it seems to be based on. As compared to communication about unexpected behaviors, therefore, communication
about expected behaviors suggests that it is based on a larger informational basis. In addition, abstract descriptions are harder to verify or to falsify than concrete descriptions are. Whenever a message refers to a directly observable behavior, readers or listeners may easily determine whether it is truthful or not. If, in contrast, a message refers to a broader semantic category of behaviors, nonobservable behaviors, or personality characteristics, it is much more difficult for readers and listeners to prove that it is true or that it is false. Because people generally assume that interpersonal messages are truthful unless proven otherwise, communications about expected behaviors thus get accepted more easily (because it is more difficult to falsify them) than communications about nonexpected behaviors do. Apart from affecting the verbalization of behaviors, expectations may also affect how listeners or readers decode verbally described events and behaviors. This effect is particularly well documented in the case of natural language quantifiers such as the ones that are used to verbally describe probabilities. A word like ‘probable’ may be interpreted as denoting different probabilities depending on whether it is used to describe events that a priori seem likely versus to describe events that a priori seem unlikely. For instance, the statement that ‘it will probably rain tomorrow’ may be interpreted by listeners or readers as denoting a much higher likelihood when the forecast is about the weather in Belgium than when it is about the weather in California.
Expectations Affect Reality Perhaps the most intriguing characteristic of expectations is that they may make themselves come true. Among the best known manifestations of this phenomenon is the treatment belief effect (better known as the placebo effect) that is said to occur when the expectation that a treatment will work in itself induces improvement. However, expectations affect reality in a variety of other situations as well. Interpersonal expectations sometimes lead observers to behave in such a manner that they encourage or even evoke the expected behaviors or performances in others. One well-known example of such interpersonal self-fulfilling prophecies is the so-called Pygmalion effect, indicating that individuals about whom high expectations exist do show an improved performance. The Pygmalion effect has been extensively studied in the context of teacher expectations, with the scientific consensus presently being that teacher expectations do affect pupil performance in a robust manner yet to a typically small extent. Yet, self-fulfilling prophecies are also involved in demand effects (also known as experimenter bias, occurring when an experimenter evokes the expected behaviors in participants) in studies with both human and animal participants. One particularly intriguing manifestation of a self-fulfilling prophecy is stereotype threat. This phenomenon occurs when a negative stereotype evokes a stereotype-consistent bad performance in members of the stereotyped group. In order for it to occur, a set of conditions must be met. First, group members must be aware of the negative stereotype that exists about their social group (e.g., women must be aware of the stereotype saying that women are worse at mathematics than men are).
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Second, their group membership must be salient, either because it chronically is or because situational cues draw the group members’ attention to it (e.g., women having heard sexist jokes or having seen sexist commercials). Third, group members must be aware of the fact that the task at hand calls on the ability that their group supposedly lacks (e.g., women knowing that a test they take measures mathematical ability). Fourth and finally, the relevant achievement domain must be personally important to them (e.g., women who wish to pursue a career in mathematics). When these conditions are met, group members may underachieve as compared to a situation in which they are not met and as compared to other groups. The opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy is a self-defeating prophecy or an expectation that falsifies itself. Self-defeating prophecies have been studied less intensely than self-fulfilling prophecies. One example of how expectations may both validate and falsify themselves is to be found in the domain of affective expectations. These expectations affect actual emotional experience such that either assimilation effects (with the actual experience being more similar to the expected one than if the expectation had not existed) or contrast effects (with the actual experience being more dissimilar to the expected one than if the expectation had not existed) may occur.
Conclusion Expectations are ubiquitous in human behavior. The frequently occurring impression that one’s expectations are borne out may be due, at least in part, to the sometimes distorting effects of expectations on behavioral, affective, and cognitive processes. However, the mere existence of successful instrumental and classical learning processes reveals that people can and do develop adequate expectations.
See also: Classical Conditioning; Hope and Optimism; Intention; Motivation; Operant Conditioning; Planning; Prejudice, Discrimination, and Stereotypes (Racial Bias); Self-Efficacy; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy;
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Social Loafing (and Facilitation); Social Values (Influence on Behavior); Surprise; Uncertainty.
Further Reading Armor DA and Taylor SE (1998) Situated optimism: Specific outcome expectancies and self-regulation. In: Zanna MP (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 30, pp. 309–379. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Buehler R, Griffin D, and Peetz J (2010) The planning fallacy: Cognitive, motivational, and social origins. In: Zanna MP and Olsen JM (eds.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 43, pp. 1–62. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Domjan M (2005) Pavlovian conditioning: A functional perspective. Annual Review of Psychology 56: 179–206. Dunning D, Griffin D, Milojokovic JD, and Ross L (1990) The overconfidence effect in social prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 568–581. Geers AL and Lassiter GD (1999) Affective expectations and information gain: Evidence for assimilation and contrast effects in affective experience. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35: 394–413. Jussim L and Harber KD (2005) Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved, and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review 9: 131–155. Kahneman D and Tversky A (1979) Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291. Miller DT and Turnbull W (1986) Expectancies and interpersonal processes. Annual Review of Psychology 37: 233–256. Ross L, Lepper MR, Strack F, and Steinmetz J (1977) Social explanation and social expectation: Effects of real and hypothetical explanations on subjective likelihood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35: 817–829. Stangor C and McMillan D (1992) Memory for expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information: A review of the social and social developmental literatures. Psychological Bulletin 111: 42–61. Stewart-Williams S and Podd J (2004) The placebo effect: Dissolving the expectancy versus conditioning debate. Psychological Bulletin 130: 324–340. Trope Y and Liberman N (2003) Temporal construal. Psychological Review 110: 403–421. Weinstein ND (1980) Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39: 806–820. Wigfield A and Cambria J (2010) Expectancy-value theory: Retrospective and prospective. In: Urdan TC and Karabenick SA (eds.) The Decade Ahead: Theoretical Perspectives on Motivation and Achievement. Advances in Motivation and Achievement, vol. 16A, pp. 35–70. Bingley: Emerald Group. Wilson TD and Gilbert DT (2003) Affective forecasting. In: Zanna MP (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 35, pp. 345–411. New York: Elsevier.