Representations of Mind and Behavior

An important problem that people must solve when dealing with human behavior is to break behavior up into meaningful units so as to interpret, explain, and evaluate it. Jodie Baird, Dare Baldwin, and I have studied a basic step in this process -- the parsing of ongoing behavior streams (Baird, Baldwin & Malle, 2002). We found that the completion of intentions serves as an important cue in breaking up behavior into units. This finding is also consistent with the theoretical claim that people interpret behavior by classifying it as observable or unobservable and intentional or unintentional (Malle & Knobe, 1997b). These two distinctions form a simple 2 x 2 classification of events that turns out to be central to people's attention to behavior (Malle & Pearce, 2001) and their selection of events to wonder about and explain (Malle & Knobe, 1997b).

Recently I have begun to document the ways in which these different types of behavioral events (observable and unobservable, intentional and unintentional) are reflected in verb classes of the English language (Malle, 2002-c) and how people's judgments of causality and their explanations differ for these verb classes. This is a first step in a larger program of demonstrating how people's folk theory of mind and behavior has established itself in grammatical and semantic features of language.

References