Actions are usually generalized among social group members. Importantly, the efficiency of an action with respect to achieving an external target determines action understanding, and it may have different degrees of social relevance to social groups. Thus, this study explored the role of action efficiency in action generalization. We used computer animations to simulate actions in social groups initiated by visual action cues or category labels, and we measured differences in response times between identifying actions that were and were not consistent with group members, without explicit requirements regarding generalization. It was found that in both visually introduced and explicitly labeled social groups, when the group members acted inefficiently toward the external object, perceivers identified group‐consistent actions faster than group‐inconsistent actions, indicating that the exemplars' common inefficient actions are generalized to the unknown ingroup member, accordingly facilitating the identification of expected consistent inefficient action (Experiment 1). As this effect was not present when removing social group cues, it was determined to be specific to social groups (Experiment 2). Importantly, such generalization was not observed when the identical action was deemed efficient toward the external object (Experiment 3) and was specific to the demonstration of the action being completed by multiple group members rather than being repeated twice by one group member, supporting the group‐based inference and ruling out the possibility of the increased memorability of inefficient actions leading to more generalization relative to efficient actions (Experiment 4). Therefore, the efficiency of an action bounds the generalization of the action across social group members through a process that is spontaneous and implicit. This constrained action generalization may be due to inefficient actions being represented as culture‐specific conventional forms.

中文翻译：

---

跨组成员的行动概括：行动效率很重要

行动通常在社会团体成员之间泛化。重要的是，一项行动在实现外部目标方面的效率决定了对行动的理解，它可能与社会群体具有不同程度的社会相关性。因此，本研究探讨了动作效率在动作泛化中的作用。我们使用计算机动画来模拟由视觉动作线索或类别标签发起的社会群体中的动作，并且我们测量了识别与群体成员一致和不一致的动作之间的响应时间差异，而没有关于概括的明确要求。发现在视觉介绍和明确标记的社会群体中，当群体成员对外部对象的行为效率低下时，感知者比群体不一致的行为更快地识别出群体一致的行为，这表明样本的共同低效行为被推广到未知的内群体成员，因此促进了预期一致的低效行为的识别（实验 1）。由于在删除社会群体线索时不存在这种影响，因此确定它是特定于社会群体的（实验 2）。重要的是，当相同的动作被认为对外部对象有效时（实验 3），并且特定于演示由多个组成员完成的动作，而不是由一个组成员重复两次，则不会观察到这种概括，支持基于组的推理并排除低效动作的可记忆性增加导致相对于有效动作更泛化的可能性（实验 4）。因此，行动的效率通过自发和隐含的过程限制了行动在社会群体成员之间的泛化。这种受限的行动概括可能是由于低效的行动被表示为特定于文化的传统形式。