When Success Is Surprising: Children’s Ability to Use Surprise to Infer Competence

How do we learn who is good at what? Building on the idea that humans draw rich inferences from others' emotional expressions, here we ask whether others' surprised reactions to performance outcomes can elicit inferences about competence. Across three experiments, participants were asked to choose "who is better" in scenarios where two students performed identically on the same task but their teacher expressed surprise to only one of them. In Experiment 1 (<i>n</i> = 60, adults) and Experiment 2 (<i>n</i> = 90, 6- to 8-year-old children), participants' responses were modulated by not only the students' performance outcomes (success or failure) but also the teacher's response to the outcomes (surprise or no surprise). Specifically, participants preferentially chose the student who did not elicit the teacher's surprise as more competent when both students succeeded, but chose the student who elicited surprise when both failed. Experiment 3a (<i>n</i> = 150, 4- to 8-year-olds) replicated this pattern in 6- to 8-year-olds as a group-but not in 4- to 5-year-olds-with increasing robustness with age. Finally, this pattern was significantly reduced in Experiment 3b where the teacher's surprise was directed at an irrelevant event rather than the student's performance (<i>n</i> = 90, 6- to 8-year-olds). Taken together, these results suggest that even non-valenced emotional reactions to performance outcomes-being surprised at someone's success or failure-can inform inferences about valenced qualities such as competence. More broadly, the current findings demonstrate that emotional expressions we observe in our daily lives can lead to nuanced yet consequential social judgments.