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Unpredictability constitutes a deeply ingrained phenomenon of our everyday lives. At some times, things happen unpredictedly, breaking our hitherto existing expectations and filling us with surprise; at other times, we neither hold expectations nor make predictions, and what will happen will do so unpredictably. Both the unpredicted and the unpredictable have been subject to extensive previous research endeavors which have spawned a bunch of heterogeneous theories and evidence, controversial debates, and a range of open questions. In this dissertation, I investigate the cause and structure of responses to surprise and the valence of the unpredicted and the unpredictable to foster a successive integration of single threads and to increase the psychological understanding of unpredictability. Chapter 1 introduces the relevant theoretical background and provides an overview on the current literature. Chapter 2 investigates the effects of the degree of deviance and expectation constraints on the behavioral, affective, experiential, and cognitive responses to unpredicted, surprising events. The evidence obtained in two experiments suggests that the key driving mechanism of surprise is unexpectedness and not the ease of making sense of an event. Beyond that, the behavioral, experiential, and cognitive responses to surprise apparently unfold in a dichotomous way, distinguishing between deviance and non-deviance without being sensitive to finer gradations. On the affective dimension, the evidence points towards surprise being inherently valence-free. Chapter 3 transfers the economic principles of risk-return trade-off and risk premium to the psychological domain, investigating whether and what value people attach to predictable social interactions. Across seven experiments, I demonstrate that people are willing to forgo substantial parts of their potential returns to ensure interacting with a predictable (vs. unpredictable) partner. This suggests an overall negative valence of the unpredictable. Chapter 5 concludes with discussing implications, limitations, and future directions of the research presented.
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