Analogical transfer of intentions

Analogical transfer of intentions Luiza Shahbazyan (l.shahbazyan@gmail.com) Georgi Petkov (gpetkov@cogs.nbu.bg) Lilia Gurova (lgurova@nbu.bg) Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology New Bulgarian University 21 Montevideo Str. , Sofia 1618, Bulgaria present by establishing similarities with the past (Penn, Holyoak, & Povellini, 2008; Baldwin, 2002; Heusmann, 1998; Dodge, 2006). Their views diverge, however, when it comes to the mechanisms that enable us to accomplish such inferences. Surprisingly, little empirical evidence has been accumulated so far that might help to resolve the debate. The next section highlights what the main controversy is about. Abstract Humans are exceptionally good at inferring the intentions behind particular behavior even when the situation is complex or the context is completely new. In this paper we explore the hypothesis that a kind of analogical transfer from past experience to present situations plays an important role in the process of attributing intentions to ambiguous actions. The participants in our experiment were presented with two stories, the latter containing an ambiguous action. They were asked to evaluate how plausible was that the actor in the second story had a particular intention, either positive, or negative, or neutral. We found that the participants rated higher the plausibility of a negative intention when the preceding story was relationally similar and its actor manifested negative intentions. The attribution of intention to the ambiguous action was not different from that in the control condition when the preceding story was dissimilar or perceptually similar, or when its actor manifested positive intentions. These findings suggest that an analogical transfer of intentions does play a role in the attribution of intentions to ambiguous actions but the effect is limited to the attribution of negative intentions. Keywords: relational similarity; analogical understanding intentions; hostile attribution bias Controversies over understanding intentions transfer; Introduction Imagine that you are working on submitting a joint project with several partners. Just before the deadline, one of the partners, an ex-colleague of yours, calls to apologize that her organization won’t be able to participate due to some legal issues. The withdrawal seriously damages the structure of the proposal and you are not sure whether there will be enough time to negotiate a new partnership or rewrite the framework. And the situation has left you wondering: Did she do it on purpose to sabotage your efforts? Or was it just an unhappy incidence? Or maybe she stepped back in order to protect your project? We engage in such kind of reasoning on a daily basis and the attributions made have a significant impact on how we encode, interpret, and respond to social events (Baldwin & Baird, 2001; Dodge, 2006). Although we often deal with situations that are novel or ambiguous with regard to the intentions of the actors, it is fascinating that intentional understanding is typically fast, effortless and, to a great extent, reliable. Many researchers subscribe to the view that this is possible due to the generativity of our knowledge system that allows us to infer unavailable aspects of the Within the social information processing paradigm (Crick & Dodge, 1994), researchers have taken for granted that understanding intentions depends on previous knowledge and past experience (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Huesmann, 1998; Dodge, 2006). Huesmann (1998), for example, argued that attributing benign or hostile intentions to others’ actions depends on how elaborated and easily accessed in memory are the hostile and the benign scenarios (schemas) about this type of situation. Such knowledge structures support the inference of missing information that is not available directly from the information input (Burks, Laird, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1999). Consistently, findings from social and developmental research have shown that experience of peer victimization (Yeung & Leadbeater, 2007) and abuse during childhood (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990) are associated with the tendency to attribute hostile intentions to ambiguous actions, the so called hostile attribution bias (HAB). It was demonstrated as well that negatively-oriented social knowledge predicts over-attribution of hostile intentions (Burks et al., 1999; Dodge, Laird, Lochman, & Zelli, 2002). According to Penn and his collaborators (Penn & Povinelli, 2007; Penn et al., 2008), however, the mapping of incoming information to perceptually similar 1 scenarios cannot explain the sophisticated intentional attribution that humans are capable of. Drawing on the latest findings about how humans and primates understand intentions, they further insisted that “reading” mental states requires an The term “perceptual similarity” is defined here as “similarity between attributes” and it is used as a synonym of “superficial similarity”. Perceptual similarity is usually contrasted with relational similarity, which is defined as “similarity between higher-order relations” and which is used in this paper as a synonym of “structural similarity”.