Table 1
Examples of Scenarios and Exemplars for the concept described as “The realization that each passer-by has a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
| SCENARIO | EXEMPLAR | DESCRIPTIVE STATEMENTS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (stranger on a train) | A | On the train, he looked at the woman in the opposite seat as she opened her laptop and wondered what type of work she might do. |
| 1 | B | The man on the train was looking at sheet music and humming to himself and she thought he might be a musician travelling all over the country to give concerts. |
| 1 | C | She kept thinking that the woman sitting across the aisle on the train might be a scientist because she was studying papers with complicated looking graphs. |
| 2 (a colleague speaks a different language) | A | Listening to her colleague answer the phone in his mother tongue, she suddenly realized that he grew up in a tropical country. |
| 2 | B | She heard the office manager talk to his children in a foreign language and started daydreaming about how their upbringing might have differed from her own. |
| 2 | C | When he heard the team manager answer her phone in fluent Japanese, he imagined what it was like growing up in the Japanese culture. |
| 3 (teacher in a private setting) | A | It was strange to see the math teacher in the dairy section, but he realized that the teacher must have a family too. |
| 3 | B | At the concert he became aware of the coach’s private life when he saw him dressed for a party rather than in his usual sports outfit. |
| 3 | C | When the history teacher proudly told them he ran the New York City marathon, they knew he must have spent a lot of his free time training. |
Figure 1
Mean Similarity judgments according to reading phase exposure (Similarity vs. Diversity).