Psychologists have explored what lies at the root of the feeling of surprise. In particular, we know that surprise comes in degrees.
心理学家已经探索到了潜藏在惊讶情绪下的东西。特别是，我们知道了惊讶是分等级的。
What drives this feeling of surprise? 是什么驱使着这种惊讶的感觉呢？
There have been two main types of explanations. One focuses on probability. The idea is that when things are unexpected because they don’t happen often, they are surprising. The second idea is that explanation matters. The degree of surprise people experience depends on how easily they can explain what happened.
这里主要有两种类型的解释。第一种解释集中在事件的可能性上。当事情出于意料之外，因为它们不经常发生，人们就会感到惊讶。第二种就是与解释（事件发生缘由）有关。人们经历的惊讶程度取决于人们是否很容易解释清楚发生了什么。
2015年8月发表在认知心理学上的一份详尽研究，其作者是 Meadhbh Foster and Mark Keane，探究了解释（事件发生缘由）的难易程度对惊讶情绪的影响。
A final study manipulated ease of explanation in a different way. For each scenario, a hint was given that would either make an explanation fairly easy to generate or hard to generate. In a scenario about bumping into a friend in a foreign country, participants might receive the hint copycat (which suggests the explanation that the friend copied the plan) or circus (which does not suggest an obvious explanation). Another scenario involved seeing a rhino at a coffee shop (in which case circus prompts an explanation, but copycat does not).
最后一个研究，是以不同的方式操纵解释的难易程度。对每一个场景而言，给出一个暗示可以使人们思考解释的时候变得更容易，也可以变得更困难。在国外偶然碰到一个朋友，这样一个场景中，参与者有可能接受到，copycat（模仿者）的暗示【含有暗示意义：这个朋友拷贝了我的计划】，或circus（马戏团）的暗示【没有含有明显的暗示意义】。另一个场景涉及到在一个咖啡店看到一只犀牛【在这个案例中，circus（马戏团）可以激发一种解释，但是copycat（模仿者）却不能激发解释】。When given a prompt that suggests an explanation, people found the scenarios less surprising than when given a prompt that did not suggest an explanation. 当给出一个含有暗示意义的刺激物时，人们对这些场景的惊讶情绪较小，当给出一个不含有暗示意义的刺激物时，人们对这些场景的惊讶情绪较大。
An interesting facet of this study is that some participants were asked to judge the probability of the event. The prompt did not influence people’s judgments of how probable it would be to experience these events. So, the judgments of surprise seem to be related to the ability to explain them rather than the low probability of the surprising events.
这个研究中有趣的一方面是，要求一些参与者来判断事件发生的可能性。刺激物不会影响人们对“事件发生的可能性”的判断。所以，对惊讶的判断似乎与解释事件的能力联系较大，与惊讶事件发生的可能性的联系较小。
This finding suggests that surprise has value, because it serves as a signal of how much work someone will need to do to understand what has just happened. For very surprising situation, a person will need to set aside time to really figure out what is going on. Having an emotional marker of this difficulty is useful, because it signals that someone needs to devote time to making sense of the world. And, because surprise tends to make people stop what they are doing, it clears some mental space for doing that work.
这个发现说明惊讶这种情绪很有价值，因为它像是一种信号，预示着一个人需要做多少事情才能理解刚刚发生了什么。对于每一个惊讶的情形而言，一个人需要留出一些时间来真正思考接下来会发生什么。拥有这种困难的情绪标记非常有用，因为它发出了这样一个信号：一些人需要投入时间来理解世界。除此之外，因为惊讶倾向于让人们停下手中正在做的事情，这就为正在做的工作清理出了一些心理空间。
吃惊表示你见识少