Mindreading: Judgments About Intentionality and Motives in Dispositional Inference

Abstract

Judgments about the intentionality of other people's behavior are central to social perception. Perceivers typically explain a target person's intentional behavior in terms of the target's motives. In turn, inferences about motive often inform trait inferences about the target. In comparison to past theories, this multiple inference model portrays perceivers as interested in the specific beliefs and motives of others, rather than viewing perceivers as focusing on abstract causal reasoning. The model is applied to the literatures on attitude, morality, and ability attribution. In contrast to intentional behavior, perceivers explain a target person's involuntary, unintentional behavior by using a simpler process of global causal attribution.

Notes

¹Of course, it might be possible to extend single inference theories to address multiple inferences about a target person. At present, however, it remains unclear what form such extensions would take.

²Social perception researchers have devoted considerable attention to the variable of “choice” (Jones & Harris, 1967). For example, perceivers in the “no-choice” conditions of many attribution studies were asked to form an impression of a person who composed an essay under conditions in which the direction of the essay was assigned by an authority figure (Jones, 1979; Jones & Harris, 1967). Perceivers may, indeed, see this situation as placing constraints on the target. As described in forthcoming sections, however, the target's behavior is nevertheless viewed as an intentional response to these constraints.