HC 212
Intro to Exp Psychology II
Prof. Bertram Malle
Winter 1998

Lecture 7: Jan 27
Adults' and Children's
Social Cognition of Behavior

The Folk Theory of Behavior

People are not only interested in using behaviors as "symptoms" of personality; they also want to make sense of behavior itself. As social animals, we are uncomfortable with behaviors or situations whose meaning is unclear to us, so we need to discover (or sometimes guess) its meaning. The processes of understanding behaviors serve three functions: (a) they guide our own reaction to that behavior (should I be angry, insulted, amused, flattered?); (b) they help predict that person's next behavior; and (c) they help control the behavior (e.g., encouraging the person to do it again or to stop it).

A large part of my own research looks at the "tools" that people use to make sense of each other (and themselves). These tools form a conceptual framework through which people think about human behavior, and it can be called the "folk theory of behavior." One issue in exploring this folk theory is what kinds of behaviors people pay attention to and try to explain. I have introduced a classification of behavioral events that results from crossing the observable-unobservable distinction with the intentional-unintentional distinction.

IntentionalUnintentional
ObservableActionsMere Behaviors
UnobservableIntentional ThoughtsExperiences

Now we can ask which of these behaviors people attend to and explain. To answer this question we need to distinguish between the "actor" role (people paying attention to their own behaviors) and the "observer" role (people paying attention to others). As actors, people pay most attention to their own experiences (which are unobservable and unintentional); as observers, they pay most attention to other people's actions (which are observable and intentional). The same asymmetry holds for the kinds of behavioral events actors and observers explain. I have written up several studies on this issue in a paper and have supervised an honors thesis on it.

Another question is how people judge whether a behavior is intentional or not. This is an important question on which depends how we explain the behavior at issue, how much credit or blame we assign to it, and how we try to change it. Sometimes these judgments are easy, such as when a behavior is described verbally - in fact, people show extremely high agreement in judging a behavior's intentionality when the beahvior is described verbally. If you observe a behavior, however, such a judgment may be more difficult; but people have strategies for that case as well (e.g., waiting until the actor repeats the action; provoking him or her into doing it again). These more deliberate judgments will try to gather information on the components of intentionality (described in the short conference paper you read): the actor's desire, belief, intention, awareness, and skill. Only when all five components are fulfilled will people ascribe intentionality to a behavior, as demonstrated in another paper.

Finally, I briefly discussed that people explain intentional behaviors with the reasons (beliefs, desires) that the actor had for deciding to act, whereas people explain unintentional behaviors with the causes that brought that behavior about.
(Note: The current predominant model in social psychology takes a different position that I am proposing here; it claims that people explain all behaviors with causes, which can be classified either as "person causes" or "situation causes." We'll see whether I can weaken researchers' adherence to this model.)

Development of Social Cognition

In the developmental literature, the conceptual framework that I described above as the folk theoyr of behavior is usually called "theory of mind." The two labels have a slightly different focus, but they both refer to the way people make sense of behavior by referring to states of the mind.

1. When do children acquire the concepts and in what order?

Research over the last 15 years has suggested the following "time table" of the differentiation of children's concepts.

Age 2 3 4 later
Concepts "desire" "belief-desire" "false belief" intention vs. desire, awareness, intentionality
Evidence behavioral responses verbal explanations experiments (experiments)
Problems pretense? desire is primary too tough? uncharted

This schematic table is based largely on work by Wellman (1990) and Perner (1991). The classic experiment on false beliefs (the one in which Maxi leaves the room, his Mom switches the chocolate from the green box into the blue box, and Maxi will look in the green box) was conducted by Wimmer and Perner (1983) - two Austrians, by the way...

2. What are the origins of this acquisition?

We discussed three such origins or precursors: (1) inter-action (the give and take that we called turn-taking in Lecture 7), (2) joint attention, and (3) language development. In each case, children first perform certain behaviors themselves and only after some time begin to appreciate (in some early form of reflective knowledge) that others do the same. For example, children are capable of joint attention (showing, following gaze) long before they appreciate the fact that two different people can turn their mind to one object, and long before they appreciate the fact that those two different people can see different parts of that object (perspective-taking capacities develop around age 5-6; see your textbook). Also, children are capable of emotions or surprise long before they understand that others are, say, disappointed when their desires remain unfulfilled or surprised when their beliefs/expectations are violated.

3. What happens if no such theory develops? (The case of autism)

We briefly touched on the complex topic of autism, which provides evidence that the theory of mind may be a relatively autonomous "module" in the human cognitive system. Experiments by Baron-Cohen, Frith, and Leslie (1985, 1986) showed that 4-year-old (or older) autistic children fail the false-belief test, whereas 4-year-old normal and Down-syndrome kids pass the test. Moreover, autistic children seem to have no trouble when reasoning about physical causality; they have enormous difficulty, however, when reasoning about mental causality - that is, reasoning about how intentional actions are based on beliefs and desires. Most recent studies suggest that autistic children already have difficulties in one of the precursors to theory of mind, namely, joint attention. They seem to keep very little eye-contact, do not "check" with their caretaker when playing, perform few to no "showing" acts, and do not consistently follow others' gaze or pointing.

For more information on autism, try this site. Note, however, that the authors of the web page use the expression "theory of mind" as if theory of mind itself refers to a deficit. But really, what they mean (I hope) is the hypothesis that "autistic childern do not develop a theory of mind." You may also explore the following pages: