Intention beyond desire: Spontaneous intentional commitment regulates conflicting desires

Abstract

The human mind is a mosaic composed of multiple selves with conflicting desires. How can coherent actions emerge from such conflicts? Classical desire theory argues that rational action depends on maximizing the expected utilities evaluated by all desires. In contrast, intention theory suggests that humans regulate conflicting desires with an intentional commitment that constrains action planning towards a fixed goal. Here, we designed a series of 2D navigation games in which participants were instructed to navigate to two equally desirable destinations. We focused on the critical moments in navigation to test whether humans spontaneously commit to an intention and take actions that would be qualitatively different from those of a purely desire-driven agent. Across four experiments, we found three distinctive signatures of intentional commitment that only exist in human actions: “goal perseverance” as the persistent pursuit of an original intention despite unexpected drift making the intention suboptimal; “self-binding” as the proactive binding of oneself to a committed future by avoiding a path that could lead to many futures; and “temporal leap” as the commitment to a distant future even before reaching the proximal one. These results suggest that humans spontaneously form an intention with a committed plan to quarantine conflicting desires from actions, supporting intention as a distinctive mental state beyond desire. Additionally, our findings shed light on the possible functions of intention, such as reducing computational load and making one's actions more predictable in the eyes of a third-party observer.