Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where theory of mind and moral judgment meet. Preschool children's judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side effect is brought about "on purpose" when the side effect itself is morally bad, but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of whether something was done on purpose (as opposed to judgments of purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentionality are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative-even in preschoolers-challenges current understanding. Young children's judgments regarding foreseen side effects depend on whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the theory-of-mind concept "not care that P," children show the side-effect effect.     

Intentional inferences are not more likely than unintentional ones: some evidence against the intentionality bias hypothesis

We conducted a study to test the hypothesis that inferences about intentionality are biased toward an intentional interpretation. Contrary to previous research, participants were no more likely to judge ambiguous actions as intentional in a speeded compared to an unspeeded condition. Further, participants were faster to respond and more consistent in responding to unintentional rather than intentional actions.     

Enough skill to kill: Intentionality judgments and the moral valence of action

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action’s intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people’s intentionality judgments. His and other researchers’ studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull’s-eye). The present five studies offer an alternative account of these provocative findings. We suggest that people see the morally significant action examined in previous studies (killing) as accomplished by a basic action (pressing the trigger) for which an unskilled agent still has sufficient skill. Studies 1 through 3 show that when this basic action is performed unskillfully or is absent, people are far less likely to view the killing as intentional, demonstrating that intentionality judgments, even about immoral actions, are guided by skill information. Studies 4 and 5 further show that a neutral action such as hitting the bull’s-eye is more difficult than killing and that difficult actions are less often judged intentional. When difficulty is held constant, people’s intentionality judgments are fully responsive to skill information regardless of moral valence. The present studies thus speak against the hypothesis of a moral evaluation bias in intentionality judgments and instead document people’s sensitivity to subtle features of human action.     

Mental state attributions and the side-effect effect

The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not specifically intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes.     

The attribution of intentionality: the role of skill and morality

The present study contributes to the discussion on the different components which constitute the intentionality concept about an undesired side effect, focusing on the morality and the skill. Two hundred and forty participants were asked to read a brief story about a car accident, in which it was explained the motivation of the high speed and objective and subjective skill of the agent to drive the car, and to fill in six questions about intentionality, objective risk, mental representation of risk, risk acceptance and blameworthiness for the outcome. The principal results showed that when the motivation is morally negative, people judge the side effect more intentional, also because they make more severe judgments about risk and blameworthiness. Moreover, when people are objectively proficient to perform the action (objective skill) the side effect is considered less risky and intentional and, in the case of a negative outcome, they are judged less severely than if they have a poor ability. Finally, a self-assessment of low skill to make the action (subjective skill) leads people to assess higher risks and, consequently, more intentionality for the side effect. The results are discussed on the basis of the literature about some specific components that make up the intentionality concept.     

Applying the intentional forgetting process to forgiveness

The current research tests the hypothesis that the cognitive process of intentional forgetting can be applied to promote forgiveness. In three experiments, participants read stories set in second person point of view sentence by sentence. Each story included a target conflict sentence. After each sentence, participants saw a cue indicating forget or remember (Experiment 1, n = 89) or important or not important (Experiment 2, n = 123) or control cue (Experiment 3, n = 198). Findings revealed that, among participants who remembered the transgression, being told to intentionally forget the transgression led to increased forgiveness (Experiments 1 & 3). However, being told that the transgression was not important had no effect on forgiveness (Experiment 2). Overall, results are consistent with the hypothesis that an active process of intentional forgetting (as opposed to a passive process of disregarding unimportant information) can promote forgiveness. The interpersonal and clinical applications of these findings are discussed.     

Decisions about a crime: downward and upward counterfactuals

Deciding about people’s responsibility, intentions and need for punishment is particularly hard and it may be often associated with counterfactual thinking, which refers to the creation of mental alternatives to actual events. Ninety-three participants were asked to generate downward or upward counterfactuals regarding a given criminal event and, then, to give judgments about defendant’s predictability, responsibility, intentionality and punishment. Results showed that downward counterfactuals had led people to judge the event less intentional, the defendant less responsible and, therefore, to give him a less severe punishment (vice versa for upward). The relationship between counterfactuals and intentionality judgments was partially mediated by the perceived defendant’s predictability of the negative outcomes. Finally, downward counterfactuals were linked to a greater focus on the context (external factors), whereas upward counterfactuals on the defendant/victim’s behaviours (internal factors). Findings were discussed considering both theoretical decision-making models and applications on the judicial field.     

The Deep Self Model and asymmetries in folk judgments about intentional action

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models.     

Differential age effects for implicit and explicit conceptual associative memory

Older adults show disproportionate declines in explicit memory for associative relative to item information. However, the source of these declines is still uncertain. One explanation is a generalized impairment in the processing of associative information. A second explanation is a more specialized impairment in the strategic, effortful recollection of associative information, leaving less effortful forms of associative retrieval preserved. Assessing implicit memory of new associations is a way to distinguish between these viewpoints. To date, mixed findings have emerged from studies of associative priming in aging. One factor that may account for the variability is whether the manipulations inadvertently involve strategic, explicit processes. In two experiments we present a novel paradigm of conceptual associative priming in which subjects make speeded associative judgments about unrelated objects. Using a size classification task, Experiment 1 showed equivalent associative priming between young and older adults. Experiment 2 generalized the results of Experiment 1 to an inside/outside classification task, while replicating the typical age-related impairment in associative but not item recognition. Taken together, the findings support the viewpoint that older adults can incidentally encode and retrieve new meaningful associations despite difficulty with the intentional recollection of the same information.     

Teleology and the intentions of supernatural agents

Teleological beliefs about the natural world often exist implicitly, and there is a positive relationship between teleological endorsement and belief in supernatural agents. In the current study, participants judged a series of scientifically unwarranted teleological explanations of biological organisms and natural non-living objects, under speeded or un-speeded instructions. After controlling for belief in the existence of supernatural agents, rates of implicit (speeded) and explicit (un-speeded) teleological endorsement were moderated by the belief that supernatural agents intentionally interact with the world. Amongst non-religious individuals, rates of implicit endorsement were significantly higher than explicit endorsement, whereas for highly religious individuals the difference was non-significant. This interaction was driven predominantly by explanations of natural non-living objects. These results are consistent with an intention-based theory of teleology, and help to reconcile the finding of a positive relationship between teleological endorsement and belief in supernatural agents, with the those of an enduring teleological bias.     

Husserl on Intentionality as an Essential Property of Consciousness

In the phenomenological tradition intentionality is considered to be an essential property of consciousness. Philosophers from this tradition （Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, etc.） generally share the following two commitments： （i） intentionality is an essential property of consciousness; and （ii） all intentional states are directed at, and are intentionally related to, objects. This view of consciousness has two pressing problems. Firstly, philosophers such as John Searle and David Rosenthal have suggested raw feelings and some forms of seemingly undirected and thus non-intentional feelings as counterexamples to the essential intentionality of conscious states. Secondly, some analytical philosophers and Husserlian scholars inspired by Frege, such as Smith and Follesdal, deny that every intentional state is related to a correlative object. This paper presents a Husserlian view concerning the essential intentionality of consciousness. It will be shown that both problems can be successfully dealt with from an essentially Husserlian and phenomenological perspective.     

Interobject spacing explains the attentional bias toward interacting objects

Spatio-temporal interactions between simple geometrical shapes typically elicit strong impressions of intentionality. Recent research has started to explore the link between attentional processes and the detection of interacting objects. Here, we asked whether visual attention is biased toward such interactions. We investigated probe discrimination performance in algorithmically generated animations that involved two chasing objects and two randomly moving objects. In Experiment 1, we observed a pronounced attention capture effect for chasing objects. Because reduced interobject spacing is an inherent feature of interacting objects, in Experiment 2 we designed randomly moving objects that were matched to the chasing objects with respect to interobject spacing at probe onset. In this experiment, the capture effect attenuated completely. Therefore, we argue that reduced interobject spacing reflects an efficient cue to guide visual attention toward objects that interact intentionally.     

The road to understanding is paved with the speaker’s intentions: Cues to the speaker’s attention and intentions affect pronoun comprehension

A series of experiments explore the effects of attention-directing cues on pronoun resolution, contrasting four specific hypotheses about the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns he and she: (1) it is driven by grammatical rules, (2) it is primarily a function of social processing of the speaker’s intention to communicate, (3) it is modulated by the listener’s own egocentric attention, and (4) it is primarily a function of learned probabilistic cues. Experiment 1 demonstrates that pronoun interpretation is guided by the well-known N1 (first-mention) bias, which is also modulated by both the speaker’s gaze and pointing gestures. Experiment 2 demonstrates that a low-level visual capture cue has no effect on pronoun interpretation, in contrast with the social cue of pointing. Experiment 3 uses a novel intentional cue: the same attention-capture flash as in Experiment 2, but with instructions that the cue is intentionally created by the speaker. This cue does modulate the N1 bias, demonstrating the importance of information about the speaker’s intentions to pronoun resolution. Taken in sum, these findings demonstrate that pronoun resolution is a process best categorized as driven by an appreciation of the speaker’s communicative intent, which may be subserved by a sensitivity to predictive cues in the environment.     

Intentional Objects

The idea of an intentional object, or an object of thought, gives rise to a dilemma for theories of intentionality. Either intentional objects are existing objects, in which case it is impossible, contrary to appearances, to think about something which does not exist. Or some intentional objects are non-existent real objects. But this requires an obscure and implausible metaphysics. I argue that the way out of this dilemma is to deny that being an intentional object is being an entity of any kind. 'Object' here does not mean thing or entity. Rather, to say that something is an intentional object is just to say that it is an object of thought (or other intentional state or act) for a subject. It is further argued that theories of intentionality should not dispense with the idea of an intentional object.