Department of Psychology, Ningbo University.
Centre of Group Behaviour and Social Psychological Service, Ningbo University.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Apr;45(4):e12957. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12957.
Actions are usually generalized among social group members. Importantly, the efficiency of an action with respect to achieving an external target determines action understanding, and it may have different degrees of social relevance to social groups. Thus, this study explored the role of action efficiency in action generalization. We used computer animations to simulate actions in social groups initiated by visual action cues or category labels, and we measured differences in response times between identifying actions that were and were not consistent with group members, without explicit requirements regarding generalization. It was found that in both visually introduced and explicitly labeled social groups, when the group members acted inefficiently toward the external object, perceivers identified group-consistent actions faster than group-inconsistent actions, indicating that the exemplars' common inefficient actions are generalized to the unknown ingroup member, accordingly facilitating the identification of expected consistent inefficient action (Experiment 1). As this effect was not present when removing social group cues, it was determined to be specific to social groups (Experiment 2). Importantly, such generalization was not observed when the identical action was deemed efficient toward the external object (Experiment 3) and was specific to the demonstration of the action being completed by multiple group members rather than being repeated twice by one group member, supporting the group-based inference and ruling out the possibility of the increased memorability of inefficient actions leading to more generalization relative to efficient actions (Experiment 4). Therefore, the efficiency of an action bounds the generalization of the action across social group members through a process that is spontaneous and implicit. This constrained action generalization may be due to inefficient actions being represented as culture-specific conventional forms.
动作通常在社会群体成员中得到泛化。重要的是，动作对于实现外部目标的效率决定了动作理解，并且它可能对社会群体具有不同程度的社会相关性。因此，本研究探讨了动作效率在动作泛化中的作用。我们使用计算机动画来模拟由视觉动作线索或类别标签启动的社会群体中的动作，并测量了识别与群体成员一致和不一致的动作之间的反应时间差异，而没有关于泛化的明确要求。结果发现，在视觉引入和明确标记的社会群体中，当群体成员对外部对象的动作效率低下时，知觉者识别出与群体一致的动作比与群体不一致的动作更快，这表明示例的共同低效动作被泛化到未知的同组成员，从而促进了预期一致的低效动作的识别（实验 1）。由于当去除社会群体线索时，这种效应不存在，因此它被确定为特定于社会群体（实验 2）。重要的是，当相同的动作被认为对外部对象有效时，这种泛化不会发生（实验 3），并且这种泛化特定于由多个群体成员完成的动作演示，而不是由一个群体成员重复两次，支持基于群体的推断并排除了低效动作的记忆性增加导致相对于高效动作更多泛化的可能性（实验 4）。因此，通过自发和隐含的过程，动作的效率限制了动作在社会群体成员中的泛化。这种受约束的动作泛化可能是由于低效动作被表示为特定于文化的常规形式。
