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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expectancy violations theory | 14/17 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy_violations_theory | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:06:53.972000+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Evaluation of media figures === Expectancy violations are tightly related to the changes of people's evaluation on their relationships with media figures. In 2010, Cohen made comparisons between relationships with friends and media figures in order to find similarities and differences of people's reactions when their expectations are violated in these two relationships. Violations were generally divided in three categories: social violations such as making offensive comments, trust violations such as making up stories about their life experience, and moral violations such as cheating in a marital relationship or drunk driving. Research indicated that in both friendships and relationships with media figures, social and trust violations are more offensive than moral violations. Specifically, people are more intolerable about moral violations from media figures than from their friends. According to the study, the reason for the intolerance is because relationships with media figures are relatively weak that people invest less on the relationships with media figures than on friendships. The type of media figures is also an important factor to determine the changes of closeness with media figures. People have different expectations to various types of media figures. Research discussed that moral violations negatively influence relationships with athletes, damaging their positive and energetic appearance expected by the public. Social violations reduce closeness with TV hosts, whom people expect as amiable public figures. James Bonus, Nicholas Matthews, and Tim Wulf investigate adults' expectations towards movie characters before and after movie releasing. The result shows that when the villain behaves more morally than expected, there is a warming in the parasocial relationship between participants and villains. However, when conforming to moral expectations, there is no weakening in the parasocial relationship between heroes and participants.
=== Health and self-improvement === Expectancy violation theory has even been applied to encouraging healthy habits and changing bad ones. In a study by Karolien van den Akker, Myrr van den Broek, Remco C. Havermans, and Anita Jansen, expectancy violation theory was tested to see if it was successful in changing ingrained cravings for chocolate. Although researchers did not find that expectancy violation mediated responses to chocolate cravings, they believe more research is needed to determine whether this theory is profitable for this kind of application to human behavior.
=== Psychology, Behavior and Neuroscience === Behavioral and Neural Responses to Social Exclusion in Women: The Role of Facial Attractiveness and Friendliness. This study was conducted, and it was found that being socially excluded by one's own sex is more distressing than being excluded by the opposite sex. Young women are more frequently the targets of indirect aggression than older women due to intrasexual competition, and older adults tend to be less sensitive to social exclusion than younger adults. They also found that women are more likely to select attractive women to compete against when all the potential competitors were presented as friendly and when the unattractive competitors were presented as unfriendly. One study examined why expectation do or do not change after expectation violations. First, there are seven models for disconfirming expectations. Expectations are important for nearly any kind of psychological domain; for example, perception, motor control, decision-making, learning, motivation, and social interaction. Minimizing disconfirmation and the search for confirmation stabilizes expectations. When dealing with relational inconsistencies, there are two ways to resolve them. In a 2025 study, researchers identified two pathways to resolve relational inconsistencies. Clinical research has shown that maladaptive expectations contribute to disorders such as depression and anxiety, where individuals often maintain dysfunctional expectations even in the face of disconfirming evidence. Additionally, extreme violations often result in resistance to change. Therapies designed to modify dysfunctional expectations, such as exposure therapy for anxiety disorders, benefit from structured interventions that introduce moderate rather than extreme violations. The effects of parental phubbing on social withdrawal in preschool children, and the serial mediating roles of parent-child conflict and negative emotions, were examined in 2025. The study explained that Expectation Violation Theory (EVT) can be used to identify how parental phubbing reduces the quality of parent-child communication. According to EVT, when individuals' expectations are not met, negative emotions are likely to arise. Additionally, EVT suggests that parental phubbing undermines children's basic psychological needs, leading to negative emotions. In a study done by Michael, Langeloh, Tünte, Köster, and Hoehl in 2025, they look at nine-month old infants. They look at their ability to recognize an expectancy violation. Surprisingly, none-month olds were able to recognize circumstances that defer from "regularities", which is directly linked to expectancy violations theory. They figured this out through the observation of the infants pupil dilation. Xue-Rui, Bundil, Schulreich, and Shu-Chen found in 2023 that adaptive behavior is heavily reliant on the ability to adopt new information. The asymmetry of valence dependence is directly associated with expectancy violations.
=== Career development and job searching === Stephanie Smith examines how recent college graduates react to expectation violations in job searching and career development through communication. Smith finds that recent college graduates employ a package of both traditional and online social networking job searching strategies. As graduates expect job searching would be difficult, they are still surprised by the required intensity and effort. Through the lens of EVT, candidates with the most realistic goals and expectations received better results during the recruitment season. EVT also helps to understand candidates' interactions with contacts with potential rewards during the networking conversation. Also, a thank-you letter is regarded as a positive deviation from expectations because it reduces uncertainty.