Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The answers people give when asked to “think of theunexpected” for everyday event scenarios appear to be moreexpected than unexpected. There are expected unexpectedoutcomes that closely adhere to the given information in ascenario, based on familiar disruptions and common plan-failures. There are also unexpected unexpected outcomes thatare more inventive, that depart from given information, addingnew concepts/actions. However, people seem to tend toconceive of the unexpected as the former more than the latter.Study 1 tests these proposals by analysing the object-conceptspeople mention in their reports of the unexpected and theagreement between their answers. Study 2 shows that object-choices are weakly influenced by recency, that is, the order ofsentences in the scenario. The implications of these results forideas in philosophy, psychology and computing are discussed.