Ascription Of Intentionality Research Articles

The effect of wrongdoer's status on observer punishment recommendations: the mediating role of envy and the moderating role of belief in a just world.

Our proposition postulates that the correlation between the wrongdoer's status and the punishment suggestions of onlookers is primarily influenced by group-oriented envy rather than the ascription of intentionality and is moderated by the belief in a just world. In three separate studies, 389 university students were asked to read scenarios describing a hit-and-run crime committed by either a rich or a poor individual and then report their opinions on intentionality attribution (Study 1 and Study 2), envy emotions (Study 2), punishment recommendations (all three studies), and belief in a just world (Study 3). Consistently, the findings indicated that those observing recommended harsher penalties to be imposed upon high-status perpetrators engaging in the same wrongdoing (such as hit-and-run) as their low-status equivalents. The effect of the rich receiving more severe punishment was predicted more strongly by envious emotions than by intentionality attributions to high-status wrongdoers and was only present for those observers who endorsed a lower belief in a just world.

Attributional and attentional patterns in the perception of ambiguous harmful encounters involving peer and authority figures.

Self-construal influences the way people ascribe blame to victims, but it is not clear whether the same applies to harm doers, especially those in a position of authority. We examined (N = 122, men n = 60) participants' ascriptions of both blame and intentionality to harm doers (authority figure versus peer) while priming self-construal (relational versus individual self). Using eye-tracking, we explored whether priming relational self, compared to individual self, affects the allocation of attention to faces versus objects. Although no effects of priming were found, the type of harm doer influenced the way people interpreted harmful social encounters. Participants attributed both greater intentionality and blame to peer than authority perpetrators. Also, in the case of peer perpetrators, blame ascription was higher than judgements of intentionality, which was the opposite pattern for authority perpetrators, where judgements of intentionality were greater than ascribed blame. In regard to encoding, participants independently of the type of harm doer looked significantly longer at faces than at objects in violent scenes. Our results suggest the status of perpetrator influences judgements of harm independently of intrapersonal factors, such as primed self-construal. Moreover, people perceived as authority figures are not blamed for the hurtful action, despite attributed intentionality.

The Group Knobe Effect revisited: epistemic and doxastic side-effect effects in intuitive judgments concerning group agents

In this paper, we investigate the effect described in the literature as the Group Knobe Effect, which is an asymmetry in ascription of intentionality of negative and positive side-effects of an action performed by a group agent. We successfully replicate two studies originally conducted by Michael and Szigeti (Philos Explor 22:44–61, 2019), who observed this effect and provide empirical evidence of the existence of two related effects—Group Epistemic and Doxastic Knobe Effects—which show analogous asymmetry with respect to knowledge and belief ascriptions. We explain how the existence of the Group Knobe Effect and its epistemic and doxastic counterparts affects the philosophical debate on collective agency and intentionality and supports the intuitiveness of realism about collective agency among laypeople. We also critically assess the reasoning presented by Michael and Szigeti (2019) in favor of the realist-collectivist interpretation of their results (as opposed to the realist-distributivist interpretation). We argue that a thorough analysis of both their data and our new findings shows a rather wide range of differing intuitions among laypeople regarding the status of groups as agents. These results show that while some laypeople may have realist-collectivist intuitions, the contrary realist-distrubutivist intuitions are also widespread and the claim that the majority of laypeople hold collectivist intuitions regarding group agency is unjustified.

Delimiting Legal Interpretation: The Problem of Moral Bias and Political Distortion—the Case of Criminal Intention

AbstractThis essay criticizes Dworkin’s and Greenberg’s interpretivism using one concrete example, namely, the interpretation of rules of criminal law pertaining to intentionality ascriptions. In fact, according to interpretivism, some judicial interpretations of criminal intention can be explained as practices that depart from legislatively communicated content to implement moral principles. We distinguish between a Kantian and a consequentialist approach to criminal intention and claim that judicial practice can be viewed as an implementation of the consequentialist approach which pulls apart the Kantian criteria communicated by the legislator. However, we argue that, in doing so, judges open the door to folk biases, political pressures, and stereotypes that produce distorted and unfair results. To deal with this objection, interpretivism would have to both claim that judicial practice is erroneous and provide a theory of objective moral truth, yet it fails in both respects.

Reduced attention toward faces, intentionality and blame ascription in violent offenders and community-based adults: Evidence from an eye-tracking study.

People typically have a strong bias in attention toward faces to help them understand social interactions. Nonetheless some people, like incarcerated offenders and psychopaths, exhibit deficits in "face reading,"which may impair their interpretations, especially in case of attribution allocation in harmful events. In these cases, the ascription of intentionality is key in understanding the allocation of blame and structuring social information processing. Consequently, in the current study, in addition to typically studied intentionality and blame ascription levels (subfactors of hostile attributions), we also propose a new indicator of hostile attributions: intentionality/blame isomorphism, indicating reduced differentiation between those two factors. Violent prison inmates (N = 63) and community-based adults without previous history of incarceration (N = 63) took part in an eye-tracking study. In line with our hypotheses, offenders exhibited reduced attention orienting to faces as well as greater intentionality/blame isomorphism. In the case of both groups, people looked longer at the faces of the harm doer compared with the harm receiver. Additionally, greater intentionality/blame isomorphism predicted reduced attention to faces; however, when group status was included in the model, it became the only significant predictor of the attention to faces. Future studies should examine the origins of these gaze and attribution patterns and investigate consequences related to social perception and interactions of people prone to violence.

A Philosophy of Contract Law for Artificial Intelligence: Shared Intentionality

This is a chapter for the forthcoming book, Contracting and Contract Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Martin Ebers, Cristina Poncibo, and Mimi Zou, to be published by Hart Publishing. The aim of this chapter is to offer a general theory of contract law to account for the inclusion of artificial intelligence in contract practices. Artificial intelligence brings out that what makes contract law a distinctive form of legal obligation is shared intentionality. I refer to this insight as the shared intentionality thesis. Shared intentionality is the psychological capacity of one agent to share and pursue a joint goal with another agent. It is an attribute of human thought empowering human planning and the ability to share agency with others. Shared intentionality leads to a focus on objective intent to enter contractual relations in Anglo-American contract law as the primary concept in understanding what is distinctive about contractual obligation. The doctrine of objective intent in contract law operates as a Turing test for determining whether a contract has been formed. The chapter explains that it does not matter which “mind” is thought to produce this intent – human or artificial. The issue is attribution of the right sort of mental states by one contract party to another. Daniel Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance, as well as philosophical work on mindreading, can assist in developing this argument. The chapter focuses on understanding how folk psychology can lead humans to the sort of recognition that is needed to engage with increasing levels of artificial intelligence in contracting. What gives artificial intelligence intent is not some internal workings of its programming but us – the ascription of intentionality to artificial intelligence by humans. But the intentional stance on its own does not offer an adequate explanation of a special kind of intent that is needed for contract formation. It does not inform us about the sort of “we” intentionality or the ability to engage in future directed intentions as elements of stable plans of action in the form of contracts. Shared intentionality, a concept developed by philosopher Michael Bratman, evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello and others, is the core of contractual obligation. It does not matter whether this shared intentionality is the result of human or artificial agency. Of course, artificial intelligence on its own does not yet have the sort of agency required for shared intentionality but it likely will in the non-too-distant future.

Diagramming discursive intentionality—A cognitive-pragmatic model of intentional verbs

AbstractThis article presents a sign- and usage-based model of intentionality following the works of Robert B. Brandom and T. L. Short. The concept of discursive intentionality is established within Brandom’s theory of language explains discursive and practical reasoning as well as attributive and ascriptive practices. Discursive intentionality is distinguished from other intentionalities of conceptual proximity. Because Brandom’s concept of signs is underdetermined in his works, it will be complemented with T. L. Short’s theory of intentional signs. This dual theoretical framework leads to an innovative analysis of verbs which locates discursive intentionality at the semantic/pragmatic interface. After giving a definition of discursive intentionality, it will be diagrammed by breaking it down into different components (relata, relations, and predicates). Finally, it is tested regarding the plausibility of the diagrammatics of discursive intentionality, using the intentional verb “to promise” to differentiate between the ascription of intentionality and intention.

Intentional content in psychopathologies requires an expanded interpretivism.

We argue that the explanatory role of intentional content in connecting symptoms in a network approach to psychopathology hinges neither on causality nor on rationality. Instead, we argue that it hinges on a pluralistic body of practical and clinical know-how. Incorporating this practical approach to intentional state ascription in psychopathological cases expands and improves traditional interpretivism.

Intensity of Caring About an Action's Side-Effect Mediates Attributions of Actor's Intentions.

The side-effect effect (SEE) is the observation that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. The asymmetric response, however, does not represent all subjects’ judgments (Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007). It remains unexplored on subjective factors that can mediate the size of SEE. Thus, the current study investigated whether an individual related factor, specifically, whether adults’ intensity of caring about an outcome of someone’s actions influences their judgments about whether that person intended the outcome. We hypothesized that participants’ judgments about fictional agents’ responsibility for their action’s side-effects would depend on how much they care about the domain of the side-effect. In two experiments, the intensity of caring affected participants’ ascription of intention to an agent’s negative unintended side-effect. The stronger ascription of intentionality to negative than positive side-effects (i.e., the SEE; Knobe, 2003) was found only in domains in which participants reported higher levels of caring. Also, the intensity of caring increased intentionality attributions reliably for negative side-effects but not for positive side-effects. These results suggest that caring about a domain mediates an asymmetrical ascription of intentionality to negative more than positive side-effects.

Hyper- and Hypomentalizing in Patients with First-Episode Schizophrenia: fMRI and Behavioral Studies.

Historically, research investigating neural correlates of mentalizing deficits in schizophrenia has focused on patients who have been ill for several years with lengthy exposure to medication. Little is known about the neural and behavioral presentations of theory-of-mind deficits in schizophrenia, shortly after the first episode of psychosis. We investigated social cognition in 17 recently diagnosed first-episode schizophrenia (FES) patients with little or no exposure to antipsychotic medication and 1:1 matched healthy controls. We recorded behavioral and neural responses to the Animated Triangles Task (ATT), which is a nonverbal validated mentalizing task that measures the ascription of intentionality to the movements of objects. FES patients under-interpreted social cues and over-interpreted nonsocial cues. These effects were influenced by current intelligence (IQ). Control group and FES neural responses replicated earlier findings in healthy adults. However, a region of anterior medial prefrontal cortex (amPFC) of FES patients showed a different response pattern to that of controls. Unlike healthy controls, patients increased activity in this social cognition region while studying "random" movements of shapes, as compared to the study of movements normally interpreted as "intentional". Mentalizing deficits in FES consists of hypo- and hypermentalizing. The neural pattern of FES patients is consistent with deficits in the ability to switch off mentalizing processes in potentially social contexts, instead increasing them when intentionality is not forthcoming. Overall, results demonstrate complexities of theory of mind deficits in schizophrenia that should be considered when offering social cognitive training programs.

Mens rea ascription, expertise and outcome effects: Professional judges surveyed

A coherent practice of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action’s outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law.

Determinants of Punitive Attitudes Toward People with Pedophilia: Dissecting Effects of the Label and Intentionality Ascriptions.

Recent research has established marked punitive attitudes against people sexually interested in children. These negative attitudes are even more pronounced when such sexual interest is labeled as pedophilia, but are attenuated to the extent that such sexual interest is perceived as beyond one's own control (unintentional). We explored these effects in more detail by separately manipulating the label (pedophiles vs. people with sexual interest in prepubescent children) and degree of intentionality (pedophilia or sexual desire as malleable vs. not malleable). Participants recruited via an online platform (N=423) were randomly assigned to the experimental conditions and asked to rate degree of intentionality, dangerousness, deviance, and punitive attitudes toward people sexually interested in children. As expected, participants expressed stronger punitive attitudes when the label was present. The manipulation of intentionality, however, was not successful. Further analyses explored whether participants found the notion that sexual interest cannot be altered at will more credible than the opposite, particularly in presence of the pedophilia label. The results are discussed with regard to the significance of and potential intervention against the markedly strong public stigma against people with pedophilia.

Intentional Ascription in Disorganized Schizophrenia: a davidsonian perspective

Currently, there is an ongoing discussion regarding the possibility to extend Donald Davidson´s account of intentional ascription to cases of deluded subjects suffering different psychiatric disorders. Particularly, in respect to disorganized schizophrenia cases, some authors have claimed that, due to the irrational thinking and behavior of these subjects, they cannot satisfy rationality constrains to be considered intentional agents. Therefore, in these cases, it cannot be even possible to identify mental contents of their delusions. In this paper, I will challenge this view and I will argue that, if we revise and qualify some principles of Davidson´s approach, it can be legitimately extended, gradually, to delusional subjects suffering disorganized schizophrenia.

Inglés

In this paper I introduce some of the key elements of Daniel Dennett’s theory of intentional attribution and their relation with his notion of rationality. While doing so I will show that Dennett’s approach implies a circularity in the process of attribution of rationality, and that his resource to evolutionary arguments for trying to avoid an infinite regress does not help him to avoid the problem. My presentation will include a revision of Dennett’s arguments for epistemic intentional ascription and rationality attribution as well as some criticisms developed against his proposal. At the end of the article I will extend the criticisms and present my view about his proposal for ideal rationality attribution.

Evidence for the Context Dependence of the Side-Effect Effect

In four experiments involving 565 German speakers we tested several hypotheses about possible determinants of the side-effect effect (see), which consists of judging foreseen bad, but not good, side-effects of actions as intentionally produced. Experiment 1 failed to find intentionality ascriptions for bad side-effects for the majority of the participants in two different scenarios and obtained no consistent support for two hypothesized social-cognitive determinants of the see, the agent’s attitude and the mode of effect description. Experiment 2 replicated the see in the original ceo scenario, but again found no evidence that the effect was influenced by the agent’s attitude towards the side-effect. The see was also not influenced by a manipulation of the moral quality of the agent’s primary goal. Experiment 3 investigated six additional scenarios used in previous studies and again obtained clear evidence for the see only in the ceo scenario. In addition, Experiment 3 demonstrated that judgments of both intent and intentionality strongly increased if the original side-effect was described as a means to the agent’s primary goal, or as an independently pursued goal. Taken together, the findings suggest that for German speakers, the see depends on the specifics of the scenario content and is difficult to obtain outside the original ceo scenario. Consistent with these conclusions, Experiment 4 documented parallel difficulties replicating the “means effect”, an analogue of the see on the level of means, but replicated the see in a scenario closely modeled after the original ceo scenario.

Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality.

Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others.

Punitive attitudes against pedophiles or persons with sexual interest in children: does the label matter?

In the present research, we addressed the question of whether people harbor punitive attitudes against individuals sexually interested in children even if no sexual offense is mentioned and whether this effect is amplified by the clinical label pedophilia. In two online studies (total N=345), participants rated the extent to which they saw individuals sexually interested in children as necessarily committing child sexual abuse (dangerousness), responsible for their sexual interest (intentionality), and clinically disordered (deviance) before judging their endorsement of means of punishment (punitive attitudes). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which either the "pedophilia" label or the descriptive term "sexual interest in (prepubescent) children" was included in all items. Across both studies, results showed high degrees of punitive attitudes against sexually deviant men, an effect that was particularly pronounced if the pedophilia label was present. Whereas this was only latently observable in Study 1 (concealed by a suppression effect of reduced ascriptions of intentionality), in Study 2 no such suppression was observed. Unlike any other stigma we know of, punitive attitudes against pedophiles were associated positively with social desirability, suggesting that participants saw it as particularly socially desirable to condemn someone based on their deviant sexual interest.

Unconsidered Intentional Actions

The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis and conclude that it is supported neither by the existing literature nor by their own experiments, whose results I did not replicate, and that the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’ is not the best available account of the ‘Knobe Effect’.

Experimental Philosophy, Clinical Intentions, and Evaluative Judgment

Recent empirical work on the concept of intentionality suggests that people’s assessments of whether an action is intentional are subject to uncertainty. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that different people employ different concepts of intentional action. These possibilities have motivated a good deal of work in the relatively new field of experimental philosophy. The findings from this empirical research may prove to be relevant to medical ethics. After all, the intentions of medical professionals are widely considered to be important in the ethical assessment of their actions. For example, in the debate over palliative sedation for terminally ill patients, it is often said that it is permissible for a clinician to administer a potentially lethal dose of pain medication to a patient, provided that he or she by doing so intends only to relieve the patient’s suffering and does not intend to kill or hasten the death of the patient. This idea—that it can be permissible to bring about a foreseen but unintended effect (the patient’s death), although it would not be permissible to intend to bring about this same effect—is central to the principle of double effect (PDE), which has found expression in both the law and the professional codes of medical organizations. Notwithstanding this point, over the past decade or so, a number of writers have challenged the value of focusing on the intentions of clinicians when considering questions of ethically permissible conduct. They have claimed that clinical intentions are often equivocal and multiple. They also have claimed that clinicians frequently have difficulty identifying what their intentions are in a given case. In light of the importance that intention plays in medical ethics, it is surprising that no research has been done to identify causes or psychological factors that might help to explain this uncertainty over intentions in clinical reasoning. In this article, we address this issue head on. We first describe a study we conducted on intention ascription. Drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy, we investigated the possibility that the ascription of intentions to clinical actors in clinical settings is influenced by prior judgments about the goodness or badness of the consequences of the action in question. Our study was modeled on experimental studies in other contexts that have shown that people, when presented with a range of scenarios, are more likely to classify a side effect of an action as intended if the side effect is negative or reflects poorly on the actor than if it is positive or reflects well on the actor. We investigated whether this asymmetry in intention ascriptions was also present among physicians who were asked to ascribe intentions to clinical actors in certain well-defined clinical scenarios. After describing the study and its results, we discuss its implications for medical ethics.

Consumer behaviour analysis and ascription of intentionality to the explanation of consumer choice

This paper is a commentary on “Intentionality, symbol and situation in the interpretation of consumer choice” by Professor Gordon Foxall. Foxall has led a fruitful research discipline of consumer behaviour analysis that has delineated the uses of extensional environmental contingencies and intentional ascriptions for consumer description, prediction and control. One important exploration in this direction has been to detect the limits of mainstream behaviour analysis (or radical behaviourism) when it comes to complex behaviours that are under the influences of many endogenic contingencies in the market place. Dealing with this, Foxall has created intentional behaviourism described in his paper. Intentional behaviourism is a critical interpretative device that warns against naive extrapolation from the animal laboratory or closed settings and gives the researchers several conceptual layers in dealing with the complexities of consumer choice ranging from the extensional to the intentional.