Jun Yin

People implicitly generalize the actions of known individuals in a social group to unknown members. However, actions have social goals and evaluative valences, and the extent to which actions with different valences (helpful and harmful) are implicitly generalized among group members remains unclear. We used computer animations to simulate social group actions, where helping and hindering actions were represented by aiding and obstructing another's climb up a hill. Study 1 found that helpful actions are implicitly expected to be shared among members of the same group but not among members of different groups, but no such effect was found for harmful actions. This suggests that helpful actions are more likely than harmful actions to be implicitly generalized to group members. This finding was replicated in Study 2 by increasing the group size from three to five. Study 3 found that the null effect for generalizing harmful actions among group members is not due to the difficulty of detecting action generalization, as both helpful and harmful actions are similarly generalized within particular individuals. Moreover, Study 4 demonstrated that weakening social group information resulted in the absence of implicit generalization for helpful actions, suggesting the specificity of group membership. Study 5 revealed that the generalization of helping actions occurred when actions were performed by multiple group members rather than being repeated by one group member, showing group-based inductive generalization. Overall, these findings support valence-dependent implicit action generalization among group members. This implies that people may possess different knowledge regarding valenced actions on category-based generalization.

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.

The intuition of clarity-valence association seems to be pervasive in daily life, however, whether there exists a potential association between clarity (i.e., operationalized as visual resolution) and affect in human cognition remains unknown. The present study conducted five experiments, and demonstrated the clarity-valence congruency effect, that is, the evaluations showed performance advantage in the congruent conditions (clear-positive, blurry-negative). Experiment 1 through 3 demonstrated the influence of the perception of clarity on the conceptualization of affective valence, while Experiment 4 & 5 verified the absence of the influence of conceptualization on perception, thus the unidirectionality of clarity-valence association in cognition is confirmed. The findings extend the affective perceptual-conceptual associations into the dimension of clarity, thus providing support for the ideas of embodied cognition as well as implications for our preference for clarity and aversion to blur.