New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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Author(s): Rosset, Evelyn
Title: It\'s no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations
Category: published article
Length: 10
Keywords: intentionality; intentional explanation; explanatory biases;
heuristics and biases; social cognition; development; action perception

Abstract: Three studies tested the idea that our analyses of human behavior are
guided by an "intentionality bias," an implicit bias where all actions are
judged to be intentional by default. In Study 1 participants read a series of
sentences describing actions that can be done either on purpose or by accident
(e.g., "He set the house on fire") and had to decide which interpretation best
characterized the action. To tap people's initial interpretation, half the
participants made their judgments under speeded conditions; this group judged
significantly more sentences to be intentional. Study 2 found that when asked
for spontaneous descriptions of the ambiguous actions used in Study 1 (and thus
not explicitly reminded of the accidental interpretation), participants provided
significantly more intentional interpretations, even with prototypically
accidental actions (e.g., "She broke the vase"). Study 3 examined whether more
processing is involved in deciding that something is unintentional (and thus
overriding an initial intentional interpretation) than in deciding that
something is unpleasant (where there is presumably no initial "pleasant"
interpretation). Participants were asked to judge a series of 12 sentences on
one of two dimensions: intentional/unintentional (experimental group) or
pleasant/unpleasant (control group). People in the experimental group remembered
more unintentional sentences than people in the control group. Findings across
the three studies suggest that adults have an implicit bias to infer intention
in all behavior. This research has important implications both in terms of
theory (e.g., dual-process model for intentional reasoning), and practice (e.g.,
treating aggression, legal judgments).


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