Intentionality, Evaluative Judgments, and Causal Structure

Intentionality, Evaluative Judgments, and Causal Structure Jason Shepard (jason.s.shepard@emory.edu) Phillip Wolff (pwolff@emory.edu) Department of Psychology, 36 Eagle Row Atlanta, GA 30322 USA Abstract The results from a number of recent studies suggest that ascriptions of intentionality are based on evaluative considerations: specifically, that the likelihood of viewing a person’s actions as intentional is greater when the outcome is bad than good (see Knobe, 2006, 2010). In this research we provide an alternative explanation for these findings, one based on the idea that ascriptions of intentionality depend on causal structure. As predicted by the causal structure view, we observed that actions leading to bad outcomes are associated with negative social pressures (Experiment 1), that these negative pressures give rise to a specific kind of causal structure (Experiment 2), and that when these causal structures are pitted against the badness of the outcome, intentionality judgments track with causal structure and not badness (Experiment 3). While the badness of an outcome may have an indirect effect on judgments of intentionality, our results suggest that the factors that affect judgments of intentionality most directly are non-evaluative and objective. directly explained in terms of causal structure than badness of the outcome. The Side-Effect Effect (or Knobe effect) A connection between intentionality and badness has been demonstrated in research examining the so-called side-effect effect, or Knobe effect. Experiments investigating this effect have typically included two main conditions. In the harm condition, participants read scenarios like the following: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment. ’ The chairman of the board answered, ‘I don’t care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program. They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed. Keywords: Social cognition, Folk psychology, Theory of mind, Intentional action, Intentionality, Causal structure, Morality, Norms, Side-effect effect, Knobe effect. Introduction Ascriptions of intentionality play a fundamental role in our explanations of behaviors (Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001). They influence our judgments of character (Rotenberg, 1980), deservedness of blame or praise (Lagando & Channon, 2008), the impermissibility of actions (Cushman 2008), and the severity of deserved punishment (Horan & Kaplan, 1983). Standard accounts of intentionality ascription hold that judgments of intentionality are based on objective or descriptive properties of the actors and the situation, such as foreseeability, desire, and belief (Guglielmo, Monroe, & Malle, 2009; Knobe & Malle, 1997; Mele & Sverdlik, 1996; Sripada, 2010). Recent empirical work by Knobe (2003a) and others (Nadelhoffer, 2006; Wright & Bengson, 2009; Cova & Naar, 2012) raises an alternative view, that ascriptions of intentionality may be based on evaluative properties of a situation. Specifically, Knobe (2006, 2010) has argued that the likelihood of viewing a person’s actions as intentional is greater when the outcome is bad than when it is good. In this paper, we offer a critical test of this proposal. We also put forward and test another possibility, that judgments of intentionality are most directly based on the causal structure of a situation, which can be influenced at times by evaluative considerations. In a series of three experiments, we show that the phenomenon originally observed in Knobe (2003a) and others is more After reading the scenario, participants are asked “Did the chairman intentionally harm the environment? ” For this scenario, Knobe (2003a) found that 82% of the participants responded that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment. In help conditions, everything is kept the same except the side-effect is described as good. In the chairman scenario, for example, participants were told that the business plan would not only make a profit but also help the environment. Interestingly, in this alternative condition, only 23% of the participants felt that the chairman intentionally helped the environment (Knobe, 2003a). This basic finding has been replicated with other scenarios (Knobe, 2003b; Knobe, 2007; Knobe & Mendlow, 2004; Mallon, 2008; Nadelhoffer, 2004; Nadelhoffer, 2006; Uttich & Lombrozo, 2010; Wright & Bengson, 2009) and in a diverse array of populations, including Hindi speakers when the scenarios are translated into Hindi (Knobe & Burra, 2006), with four-year old children (Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006), with participants who suffer from deficits in emotional processing due to lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Young, Cushman, Adolphs, & Hauser, 2006), and with adults with high functioning autism or Asperger’s (Zalla & Leboyer, 2011). The wide range of situations and populations supports the conclusion that the basic pattern of findings is both reliable and conceptually significant, but do these findings really demonstrate that