Finding Meaning in Others' Intentions: The Process of Judging Intentional Behaviors and Intentionality Itself

The ultimate purpose of social inferences is to give meaning to others’ actions. To successfully negotiate their social environments, people must establish at least some understanding of the reasons for the behaviors of those around them. Only with this understanding can they then anticipate how their own behaviors might be received and select a course of action that will allow them to achieve their various social objectives. This basic insight lay at the heart of Heider’s (1958) seminal theorizing on the processes through which people do find meaning in social behavior and has at least implicitly guided the decades of subsequent research on this topic. However, in focusing on perceivers’ broad objectives for predicting and controlling their social environment, this research has predominantly emphasized how people think about broad and stable causes for behavior, such as individuals’ inherent dispositions or the general constraints posed by particular social situations (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1973; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). In his target article, Reeder discusses another crucial piece of information that perceivers may use to assign meaning to others’ actions: the extent to which these actions are believed to be intentional. He proposes that judgments of intentionality have a profound effect on how people interpret social behavior. When others’ actions are believed to be unintentional, social perceivers may instead be more interested in the general casual forces that are affecting behavior; however, when others’ actions are believed to be intentional, social perceivers may instead be more interested in the specific goals that are currently motivating behavior. Like others before him (Malle, 1999; McClure, 2002), Reeder presents a compelling argument for the importance of distinguishing between how people attempt to understand intentional versus unintentional behavior. Furthermore, he convincingly reviews a number of instances in which traditional accounts of social inference processes (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Krull & Erickson, 1995a; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002; Trope & Gaunt, 2000) do not fully capture the judgments that people make about particular actions that he argues are distinguished by being perceived as more intentional than many of those that are typically studied (e.g., Reeder, Hesson-McInnis, Krohse, & Scialabba, 2001; Reeder, Kumar, Hesson-McInnis, & Trafimow, 2002; Reeder, Monroe, & Pryor, 2008; Reeder, Vonk, Ronk, Ham, & Lawrence, 2004). To address these shortcomings of the traditional accounts, Reeder outlines a new multiple inference model (MIM) of social judgment that directly incorporates people’s perceptions of the intentionality of the behaviors they observe and generally describes how social perceivers might attempt to determine the motives behind those behaviors that are indeed judged to be intentional. On the whole, the MIM appears to have the potential to integrate much of the vast literature on social inference, as well as to reinvigorate research in this area by suggesting a variety of interesting new directions that could be explored. To contribute to the realization of this potential, in this article, I first discuss some specific questions concerning the cognitive processes by which people draw inferences from intentional as compared to unintentional behavior that, if addressed, would further refine the MIM and broaden its scope and utility. I then discuss more general questions concerning how social perceivers determine the intentionality of others’ behaviors. Although these types of judgments have thus far received less attention in the social inference literature, the MIM suggests that they could be critical in determining people’s subsequent processing of social information. I propose that (a) it is unlikely that lay perceivers simply classify behaviors as either intentional or unintentional and that judgments of intentionality are instead likely to vary along a continuum, and (b) people are likely to hold a variety of lay theories about intentionality that could have important influences on how they determine where on this continuum a particular behavior falls. Finally, I present data from a small study designed to provide a preliminary examination of these propositions.