The intentionality bias and schizotypy

Abstract

The “intentionality bias” refers to our automatic tendency to judge other people's actions to be intentional. In this experiment we extended research on this effect in two key ways. First, we developed a novel nonlinguistic task for assessing the intentionality bias. This task used video stimuli of ambiguous movements. Second, we investigated the relationship between the strength of this bias and schizotypy (schizophrenia-like symptoms in healthy individuals). Our results showed that the intentionality bias was replicated for the video stimuli and also that this bias is stronger in those individuals scoring higher on the schizotypy rating scales. Overall these findings lend further support for the existence of the intentionality bias. We also discuss the possible relevance of these findings for our understanding of certain symptoms of schizophrenic illness.

Keywords:

• Intentionality bias
• Intentions
• Movement perception
• Action observation
• Schizotypy
• Schizophrenia