Krishan, Monika. Effect of act typicality and homogeneity on script preferences: biases and implications. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3BP035K
DescriptionSocial commerce involves a combination of visual and verbal behaviors whose interpretations are subject to the ambiguity inherent in any given act, which, to varying degrees, may be consistent with multiple scripts. While a single act might lead to a particular inference, preceding acts in a sequence might be expected to bias subjective representations of subsequent behaviors and resulting agent related inferences. The present set of studies examined the notion of act typicality in scripts that share a context, the combined impact of the typicalities of an act sequence on script inferences and the interaction between the typicality of acts and their hierarchy within these scripts. Typicalities were found to be graded analogous to objects categories, suggesting a rich "shared" structure of scripts containing actions strongly supportive of only one of the two scripts and others highly equivocal with respect to the two scripts. Typicalities of four act sequences were found to be strongly correlated with ratings assigned to competing explanatory scripts, obtained at the end of the sequence but independent of the number of different scenes represented by the acts in a sequence. Next, sequential ratings to competing scripts in response to an unfolding act triple of non uniform typicality were found to be strongly biased towards the script suggested by the high typicality act and unaffected by the greater number of acts of medium/low typicality preceding the former. Changes in script ratings were found to be asymmetric going from high to low/medium acts and vice versa. These findings have implications for the manner in which covert scripts might be implemented via the exploitation of typicality biases.