The paper presents a theoretical analysis of surprise from the perspective of social psychology. Surprise is an emotion that occurs in response to an unexpected event. The components of surprise are as follows: (1) the trigger event of surprise, (2) the expression of surprise and (3) the emotional experience of surprise. Various approaches to the trigger event of surprise and criteria of its analysis are emphasized: the first criterion whether the trigger event is influenced by the probability of information or the activity of the subjects, and the second criterion is whether the event is included in the broader context. Paraverbal and facial expressions of surprise are described on a par with the environmental influence on the expression repertoire and intensity. The basic approaches to understanding the emotional experience of surprise are as follows: (1) descriptive approach, (2) psychosemantic approach, (3) discursive approach. Although surprise is mostly considered as a basic emotion, some researchers suggest that it plays an important role in social cognition of expectation-discrepant events. Models that explain the role of surprise in this process are as follows: (1) the attributional model of surprise developed by B. Weiner and colleagues according to which surprise is a consequence of the attribution to luck; (2) the process model of surprise developed by W. Meyer and colleagues in which surprise is included in the broader context of social cognition as a general emotional reaction to an unexpected event and the attribution and various processes of social cognition are considered as consequences of surprise. However, these models analyze surprise of isolated subject without considering the social interaction. The author defines the possibilities of analysis of surprise as a mechanism of assimilation and modification of social information stored in the prototypes, scripts and schemas.