Attribution Of Intentions Research Articles

Investigating the effect of cognitive load on the intentionality bias.

According to Rosset's dual-process model of intention attribution, our judgements of intentionality can be guided either by an automatic process leading to intentional explanations of behaviour or by a higher-level and cognitively more demanding process enabling unintentional explanations of behaviour. Based on this model, under conditions of compromised cognitive capacity, individuals should judge more behaviour to be intentional rather than unintentional. This prediction was tested in one lab-based experiment and one online experiment. Specifically, we investigated whether increased working memory load would lead to higher intentionality endorsement of ambiguous action when controlling for individual differences in working memory. Results of both experiments indicated no effect of working memory load on intentionality endorsement. The implications of these results for the dual-process model of intention attribution are discussed.

Chaxu Climate as a Double-Edged Sword: A Moderated Mediation Model of Organizational Justice, Hierarchy Level on Turnover Intention

Research on chaxu climate, a prevalent organizational phenomenon in China, has captured significant academic attention in recent years. This study aims to explain why some employees who experience chaxu climate in hospitality organizations contemplate leaving, while others do not. We propose a moderated mediation model to examine the double-edged sword impact of chaxu climate on turnover intention. Through one qualitative study and two scenarios-based experimental studies, we reveal that organizational justice plays a crucial role as a contextual cue, influencing employees’ attribution of chaxu climate and subsequent turnover intention. Perceived insider status is identified as a mediator. Furthermore, we establish a second-level moderating effect of the hierarchy level, distinguishing between supervisor and front-line employees. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed accordingly.

The recognition and the initial reaction to children's signals after experiencing maltreatment during childhood

AbstractMaltreatment during childhood has many long‐lasting effects. Victims often become parents who experience parenting difficulties, therefore contributing to the intergenerational cycle of maltreatment. This paper highlights the consequences of severe trauma during childhood on two processes critical for a sensitive response, namely the recognition of and the initial reaction to emotional signals. We argue that most interventions focus on the observed parental response to children's behaviors or on parental interpretation of children's signals, that is, the attribution of meaning or intent to the signal. Interventions should better integrate research indicating that a history of childhood maltreatment could impair the capacity to correctly identify the emotion and the immediate reaction to these signals. By failing to acknowledge these long‐lasting consequences of childhood maltreatment, scholars and practitioners might never achieve true success in intervening with families in the hope of breaking the intergenerational cycle of maltreatment.

When performing actions with robots, attribution of intentionality affects the sense of joint agency.

Sense of joint agency (SoJA) is the sense of control experienced by humans when acting with others to bring about changes in the shared environment. SoJA is proposed to arise from the sensorimotor predictive processes underlying action control and monitoring. Because SoJA is a ubiquitous phenomenon occurring when we perform actions with other humans, it is of great interest and importance to understand whether-and under what conditions-SoJA occurs in collaborative tasks with humanoid robots. In this study, using behavioral measures and neural responses measured by electroencephalography (EEG), we aimed to evaluate whether SoJA occurs in joint action with the humanoid robot iCub and whether its emergence is influenced by the perceived intentionality of the robot. Behavioral results show that participants experienced SoJA with the robot partner when it was presented as an intentional agent but not when it was presented as a mechanical artifact. EEG results show that the mechanism that influences the emergence of SoJA in the condition when the robot is presented as an intentional agent is the ability to form similarly accurate predictions about the sensory consequences of our own and others' actions, leading to similar modulatory activity over sensory processing. Together, our results shed light on the joint sensorimotor processing mechanisms underlying the emergence of SoJA in human-robot interaction and underscore the importance of attribution of intentionality to the robot in human-robot collaboration.

Emotional Invalidation and Relationship Quality: A Mediational Model Through a Social Learning Lens.

While we know childhood experiences are influential on a child's later socioemotional awareness and behavior, we are still searching for specific mechanisms that influence the transferability of childhood experiences and adult relationship functioning. In this study, we seek to further this area of investigation by examining the interpretation of ambiguous social interactions and perceptions of emotional invalidation as potential mediators of the relationship between perceptions of childhood emotional invalidation and current relationship quality. Participants completed online measures of hostile intent attributions, perceptions of childhood emotional invalidation, and current relationship quality with a significant other. They read emotionally provocative interpersonal scenarios and then reported likely emotionally invalidating reactions from their significant other to measure current perceptions of emotional invalidation. Results supported our hypotheses that perceptions of current emotional invalidation in a close, personal relationship would mediate the relationship between perceptions of childhood maternal emotional invalidation and both current relationship support and relationship conflict. Furthermore, the strength of this mediational pathway outweighed the influence of a more general hostile attribution bias. These findings have implications for prevention and intervention strategies designed to enhance interpersonal functioning.

The individual-team multilevel outputs of humble leadership based on the affective events theory

Purpose This study aims to break through the limitations of previous studies that have focused too much on the individual-level effects of humble leadership. Based on the affective events theory (AET), this study provides to construct an individual-team multilevel model of humble leadership focusing on the followers’ affective reaction and attribution of intentionality. Design/methodology/approach On the basis of subordinates’ attribution of humble leadership, it is believed that there are actually two motivations for humble leadership: true intention (serve the organizational collective interest) and pseudo intention (serve the leader’s self-interest), to which subordinates have different affective reactions, causing different leadership effectiveness. Thus, this study conducted an extensive review based on the qualitative method and proposed an integrated multilevel model of leader humility on individual and team outputs. Findings Followers’ attribution of intentionality moderates the relationship between humble leadership and followers’ affective reaction, which also determines followers’ performance (task performance, interpersonal deviant behavior and leader–member exchange); the interaction between team leaders’ humble leadership and collective attribution of intentionality influences team outputs (team outputs, organizational deviant behavior and team–member exchange) through team affective reaction; team humble leadership affects individual outputs through affective reaction and team affective climate plays a moderating role between affective reaction and individual outputs. Originality/value This study explores the individual-team multilevel outputs of humble leadership based on the AET theory, which is relatively rare in the current field. This study attempts to incorporate leaders’ motivation (such as attributions of intentionality) into the humble leadership research, by confirming that humble leadership affects affective reaction, which further influences individual-team multilevel outputs.

CSR of stock markets companies and customers purchase intentions: An empirical analysis in Spain

This research explores the relationship between IBEX 35 Firms' customers' perceptions of CSR, their attributions of CSR activities, positive affect, and purchase intentions through two independent empirical studies. Study 1 (N = 560) explores the serial mediation of four types of attributions (value-driven, stakeholders-driven, strategic-driven, and egoistic-driven) in the relationships between CSR perceptions and Purchase intentions. Study 2 (N = 831) explores the moderating role of positive affect on the relationships between CSR perceptions and purchase intentions mediated by attributions. Results indicate that customers' perceptions of CSR positively influence their attributions of CSR to a company's motives, which in turn positively influence their positive affect and purchase intentions. Positive affect was found to moderate the relationship between CSR attributions and purchase intentions. Findings highlight the importance of companies engaging in CSR activities to positively influence customers' perceptions of the company's motives, which can lead to increased positive affect and ultimately purchase intentions.

The involvement of rTPJ in intention attribution during social decision making: A TMS study

The mini-Ultimatum Game (mini-UG) is a bargaining game used to assess the reactions of a responder to unfair offers made by a proposer under different intentionality conditions. Previous studies employing this task showed the activation of responders’ right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), which could be related to its involvement in judgments of intentionality. To verify this hypothesis, in the present study we applied online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the rTPJ in responders during the mini-UG, in which we manipulated intention attribution implicitly. A cover story was employed to induce participants to believe they were interacting with another agent. We expected that interfering with the rTPJ could affect the ability of responders to assume proposers’ perspective, producing higher rates of rejections of unfair offers when offers are perceived as independent from responders’ intentionality to inequality. Twenty-six healthy women voluntarily participated in the study. In the mini-UG, an unfair distribution of the proposer (8/2 offer) was pitted against one of three alternative offers: fair-alternative (5/5), no-alternative (8/2), hyperfair-alternative (2/8). During the task, a train of TMS pulses was delivered at proposers’ offer presentation in blocks of active (rTPJ) or control (Vertex) stimulation according to an ABAB design. As expected, findings showed that rejection of the no-alternative offers was higher under TMS stimulation of the rTPJ compared with the control TMS. This effect was modulated by the degree of trustworthiness in the cover story. These data contribute defining the mechanisms and brain areas underpinning social decision making as assessed by bargaining tasks.

D2/D3 dopamine supports the precision of mental state inferences and self-relevance of joint social outcomes

Striatal dopamine is important in paranoid attributions, although its computational role in social inference remains elusive. We employed a simple game-theoretic paradigm and computational model of intentional attributions to investigate the effects of dopamine D2/D3 antagonism on ongoing mental state inference following social outcomes. Haloperidol, compared with the placebo, enhanced the impact of partner behaviour on beliefs about the harmful intent of partners, and increased learning from recent encounters. These alterations caused substantial changes to model covariation and negative correlations between self-interest and harmful intent attributions. Our findings suggest that haloperidol improves belief flexibility about others and simultaneously reduces the self-relevance of social observations. Our results may reflect the role of D2/D3 dopamine in supporting self-relevant mentalising. Our data and model bridge theory between general and social accounts of value representation. We demonstrate initial evidence for the sensitivity of our model and short social paradigm to drug intervention and clinical dimensions, allowing distinctions between mechanisms that operate across traits and states.

May the Intentional Candidate Win: The Effect of Global Performance Information on Intentionality Attributions and Managerial Hot‐Hand Predictions

ABSTRACTIn organizational contexts, managers often have to judge and predict others' performance. Previous research has consistently shown that when predicting someone's performance, people expect that a local sequence of successful outcomes will continue—the hot‐hand. The present work proposes that hot‐hand predictions occur when local streaks are dispositionally attributed to the agents' intentionality and explores how the inclusion of global performance success rates may guide intentionality inferences and moderate predictions of success after a streak. Three studies, using within‐ and between‐subjects' designs, manipulate agent's global success rate and show that after a local streak, intentionality attributions and predictions of success are lower when success rates are low (vs. high or unknown); intentionality attributions mediate the effect of success rate on predictions; hot‐hand predictions are lower for low success rate agents (vs. high or unknown) as they are not perceived as more responsible for streaky than for alternated performances.

No evidence for adult smartphone use affecting attribution of communicative intention in toddlers: Online imitation study using the Sock Ball Task.

Adults infer others' communicative intentions, or lack thereof, from various types of information. Young children may be initially limited to attributions based on a small set of ostensive signals. It is unknown when richer pragmatic inferences about communicative intentions emerge in development. We sought novel type of evidence for such inferences in 17-to-19-month-olds. We hypothesized that toddlers recognize adults' smartphone use in face-to-face interactions as incongruous with ostension and would rely on this interpretation when inferring the communicative intention of a model in a new imitation task conducted entirely online, dubbed the Sock Ball Task. In Experiment 1 with a between-subject design, we tested the hypothesis by assessing toddlers' (N = 48) imitation of sub-efficient means and the goal-outcome presented by a model, who interrupted her ostensive demonstration either by using a smartphone or by fiddling with her wristwatch, depending on the condition. We expected toddlers to imitate the sub-efficient means more faithfully in the wristwatch condition than in the smartphone condition. But there was no significant effect of condition on imitation of neither means nor goal. Thus, our hypothesis was not borne out by the results. In Experiment 2, using a within-subject design, we first assessed toddlers' (N = 24) performance in a no-demonstration baseline and then again after a no-disruption ostensive demonstration. In all three conditions with ostensive demonstration (Experiment 1: smartphone, wristwatch; Experiment 2: no-disruption), toddlers produced the demonstrated sub-efficient means significantly above the baseline level. In the no-disruption condition, goals were also imitated significantly above the baseline level. We conclude that the Sock Ball Task is a valid research tool for studying toddler imitation of novel means actions with objects. We end by discussing suggestions for improving the task in future studies.

Processing of complex traffic scenes for effective steering and collision avoidance: a perspective, from research into human control, on the challenges for sensor-based autonomous vehicles on urban roads.

An overview is provided of behavioral research into human steering and collision avoidance including the processing of optic flow, optical looming and the role of the human mobile gaze system. A consideration is then made of the issues that may occur for autonomous vehicles (AV) when they move from grid-type road networks into complex inner-city streets and interact with human drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Comparisons between human processing and AV processing of these interactions are made. This raises issues as to whether AV control systems need to mimic human visual processing more closely and highlights the need for AV systems to develop a "theory of road users" that allows attribution of intent to other drivers, cyclists or pedestrians. Guidelines for the development of a "theory of road users" for AVs are suggested.

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.

Not all hands get hot: Success rates and hot‐hand predictions

AbstractWhen predicting someone's performance, people expect that short runs of consistent successful outcomes will continue—the hot‐hand. This tendency has been shown in contexts where athletes show a local performance streak, but no other information about their performance is provided. In real‐life settings, performance predictions often use global‐performance records like success‐rate probabilities, although judgements often neglect such statistical information. Aimed at understanding psychological momentums, in a classical sports domain the present work explores how global‐performance information (success rates) about an athlete impacts intentionality judgements and moderate predictions of success after a streak. Four studies show that (1) although participants tend to predict the continuation of streaks of success, they are less likely to predict that successful streaks will continue when success rates are low (vs. high or unknown); (2) sensitiveness to local performance's consistency affects perceived ability for high‐success rate athletes and perceived effort for low success‐rate athletes; (3) the mediation model describing that intentionality attributions mediate the effect of global success‐rate information on performance predictions fits the data. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Suspicious minds and views of fairness

Do people with different views of what is fair attribute different intentions to actions? In a novel experimental design, participants were significantly more likely to attribute a no-redistribution vote to selfishness if they considered redistribution as being fair. I define this—attributing actions that do not adhere to one’s own fairness view to selfishness—as suspicious attribution. I develop a theory of intention attribution to show how suspicious attribution arises from two other findings from the experiment: the participants underestimate the number of people with fairness views differing from their own and overestimate the selfishness of participants with other fairness views. I discuss how the findings can help explain political polarization.

Social class differences in attribution of stability and purchase intention following a product-harm crisis / Diferencias entre clases sociales en la atribución de estabilidad y la intención de compra tras una crisis de reputación de un producto

Middle-class contexts foster solipsism, a social cognitive tendency that focuses on one’s internal states, goals and motivations and favours dispositional attribution. By contrast, working-class contexts foster contextualism, a social cognitive tendency that focuses on uncontrollable situational forces and favours situational attribution. The current research investigates social class differences in attribution of stability and purchase intention following a product-harm crisis. Consistent with previous research on social class differences in social cognitive tendency, four studies ( N = 680) demonstrate that middle- (vs. working-) class individuals perceive themselves as having a higher social status in society (Studies 1A and 3), which leads to a stronger tendency to attribute stability to a product-harm crisis (Studies 1A, 1B, 2 and 3), believing to a greater extent that the problem is typical of the brand’s products and the brand will likely run into similar problems in the future. Moreover, this stability attribution has downstream consequences for purchase intention — middle- (vs. working-) class individuals are less likely to purchase products from the same brand following a product-harm crisis (Study 3).

Adolescents with autism spectrum disorder exhibit intact physical causal inference but weak intention inference.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impaired mentalizing skills, specifically in understanding intentions. They have difficulty understanding social situations with multiple cues due to their limited ability to perceive subtle social contextual cues. Studies that used comic strips and the strange stories as intention attribution tests found that individuals with ASD exhibit a reduced ability in attributing intentions compared to inferring causal consequences. This study aims to use static photographs of social scenes taken in everyday settings to investigate the ability of adolescents with ASD to infer intentions in social contexts, and to explore how intention inference relates to working memory and basic attention, including sustained attention, selective attention, and divided attention. The results show that the physical causal inference ability of adolescents with ASD is comparable to typically developing adolescents, whereas intention inference is notably weaker. Furthermore, working memory predicts physical causal inference and divided attention predicts intention inference in ASD.

The Interplay of Theory of Mind and Moral Development: Children’s and Adults’ Attributions of Intent, Praise and Blame, and Deserved Consequences in False Belief Contexts

Children’s mentalizing abilities and their moral reasoning both develop rapidly during the preschool years and are jointly critical for navigating our complex social world. As children develop, they place more emphasis on intentions in making moral judgments, yet little research has examined the role of belief understanding in morally-relevant situations. We examined children’s (N = 61), and adults’ (N = 36) judgments of agent intent, deserved consequence, and blame and praise in morally-relevant belief vignettes. By 5 years of age, children consistently rated agents with false beliefs as better intentioned in a good intent condition (even though the outcome was bad) than in a bad intent condition (even though the outcome was good). Yet, even 7-year-olds had difficulty assigning consequences (reward or punishment) based on an agents’ intent, and only adults assigned consequences as a function of intent. Nonetheless, children of both ages accurately assigned praise or blame as a function of intent. Understanding of praise and blame may represent a way station along the road to more accurate assignment of reward and punishment.

Metarepresenting in communication

The standard cognitive explanation for the emergence of human communication is that it rests largely on the expression and attribution of communicative intentions which are, in turn, enabled by complex metarepresentations of mental states. This complexity is at odds with the limited metapsychological abilities of infants. But mentalistic metarepresentations are neither necessary nor sufficient in explaining communication. Coded ostensive signals (e.g., eye contact) and established channels (e.g., speech) allow that communicative episodes be identified through decoding rather than metarepresentational inferences. Thus, some metarepresentations may be unnecessary. However, metapsychology is also insufficient for explaining communication: the logic of instrumental actions permits interpreting their effect as following from intentions, yet the effect of communicative actions is often unavailable for inferring meaning. Moreover, current evidence for the developmental trajectory of communication and mental state attribution does not support the emergence of the former from the latter. My proposal is that our primitive concept of communication targets, instead, representational action. When we communicate, we typically convey a propositional content that is detached from our acts—a property absent in ordinary goal-directed actions. This view additionally raises the possibility that metarepresentational capacities evolved for representing external, communicative representations and were only later exapted for other purposes.

The Relationship Between Hostile Intent Attribution and Aggression in Japanese Children

The Relationship Between Hostile Intent Attribution and Aggression in Japanese Children