Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People’s expectations play an important role in their evalua-tions and reactions to events. There is often disappointmentwhen events fail to meet expectations—sometimes even whenthe events are still positive overall—and there is a special thrillto having one’s expectations exceeded. In four studies, weexamined how expectations influence people’s judgments ofevents where another person or people were harmed. Partici-pants judged pairs of events where a victim experienced a sim-ilar harm, but where victims were at different prior risk of be-ing harmed. We found that people judged these events as beingworse when they were less expected–that is, when the victimswere initially at lower risk of being harmed. We argue that thisbias has pernicious moral consequences.