When Success Is Surprising: Children's Ability to Use Surprise to Infer Competence.

ABSTRACT: How do we learn who is good at what? Building on the idea that humans draw rich inferences from others' emotional expressions, here we ask whether others' surprised reactions to performance outcomes can elicit inferences about competence. Across three experiments, participants were asked to choose "who is better" in scenarios where two students performed identically on the same task but their teacher expressed surprise to only one of them. In Experiment 1 (n = 60, adults) and Experiment 2 (n = 90, 6- to 8-year-old children), participants' responses were modulated by not only the students' performance outcomes (success or failure) but also the teacher's response to the outcomes (surprise or no surprise). Specifically, participants preferentially chose the student who did not e

SUBMITTER: Asaba M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12283150 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature