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Intentionality Bias

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Intentionality bias refers to a cognitive bias that involves the tendency to judge all actions as being performed intentionally[1], and that must be overridden before any actions can be judged as accidental.[1]

The intentionality bias was first proposed by Evelyn Rosset in her original 2008 research.[1] Presented with a series of sentences, participants were required to decide whether the actions described were performed intentionally or accidentally.[1] Three different studies were conducted, each measuring either the effect of time pressure or priming (i.e. a reminder that an action could be unintentional) on intentionality bias, or whether higher levels of cognitive processing are involved in judging an accidental action to be accidental than judging an intentional action to be intentional.[1] Evidence was found in support of the Intentionality Bias in all of the three studies.[1]

Subsequent research has demonstrated that the strength of intentionality bias is affected by feelings of anger[2]and by alcohol intoxication.[3] Relationships have also been found between intentionality bias and cognitive empathy[4], conspiracist ideation[5], anthropomorphism[5], schizophrenia[6] and schizotypy[7] respectively. Consequently, intentionality bias research has relevant applications in the areas of emotion[2], crime and law[1][3], individual differences[4][5][7], language[8], and mental health.[7][6]

Original research

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Background

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Rosset's 2008 research was rooted in the idea that, when judging the intentionality of an action, the first instinct is always that it was performed intentionally.[1] Hence it is only through acquiring more knowledge that points to the accidental nature of actions that we improve our ability to overcome this initial bias.[1] Due to the inbuilt nature of intentionality bias, it requires more cognitive processing to reach an unintentional judgement of an action than an intentional one.[1]

Study 1

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Study 1 tested for the existence of intentionality bias by comparing the intentionality judgements of one experimental group under time pressure against a control group with no time pressure.[1] Small groups were presented with a series of sentences on a screen, each describing an action .[1] Participants in the "speeded" condition were shown each sentence for 2400ms, whereas in the "unspeeded" condition it was shown for 5000ms.[1] Of the 74 sentences presented, 34 "test sentences" were of particular interest - each of these described an ambiguous action, that could be performed either intentionally or unintentionally.[1] An example of a prototypically accidental test sentence (i.e. an ambiguous action, but more often done unintentionally) is "He hit the man with his car".[1]

"Intentionality Endorsement Scores" were calculated to show the proportion of judgements that were intentional for each participant in each of three sentence types (test sentences being one).[1] Rosset found that the speeded group judged a significantly higher proportion of sentences as being intentional (39%) compared to the unspeeded group (33%).[1] This provides support for the existence of intentionality bias as it implies the bias was more successfully overridden when faced with less time pressure.[1]

Study 2

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Building on Study 1, Study 2 tested whether being primed with an explicit reminder that an action could have been done accidentally would affect the likelihood of interpreting them as such.[1] Participants were split into two groups, one group was primed and the other was not.[1] Participants were required to write short descriptions of the imagery that occurred to them for each action sentence.[1] Participants in the "Open-ended" group (un-primed) wrote their descriptions before receiving a seemingly last minute instruction to go back and write "on purpose" or "by accident", indicating their intentionality judgements.[1] Conversely, in the "Reminded" group (primed) participants were asked to make intentionality judgements before writing descriptions.[1]

Rosset found that the Reminded group judged significantly more actions as being accidental (45%) than the Open-ended group (36%).[1] This provides support for the idea that when not reminded of the possibility of an accidental interpretation, people are much less likely to provide such an interpretation.[1] Again suggesting that all actions are judged as intentional instinctively.[1]

Study 3

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Study 3 aimed to determine whether higher levels of cognitive processing are involved in judging an unintentional action to be unintentional than is the case for judging an intentional action to be intentional.[1] This was tested by measuring how many intentional versus unintentional action sentences were remembered by participants after reading the sentences and making an intentionality judgement.[1] Participants were split into two groups, with the experimental group making an intentionality judgement and the control group making a judgement about whether the action described was pleasant or not (in other words, the control group processed the same sentences, but for a different purpose).[1]

It was found that the experimental group remembered significantly more unintentional than intentional actions.[1] These results suggest that more processing is indeed involved in judging an unintentional action to be unintentional than judging an intentional action to be intentional[1], as research on memory has shown information that has undergone more processing is better remembered.[1] Therefore Study 3 provides further support for intentionality bias.[1] In contrast, no significant difference was found between the number of unpleasant versus pleasant actions recalled by the control group.[1]

See the original research paper, "It's no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations"[1], for other findings and further procedural details.

Limitations

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Rosset recognised an important limitation in her research: that as participants only made judgements on sentences (i.e. only responding to word-based stimuli) the results may be limited to a linguistic bias.[1] Strickland et al. found that verb types and grammatical structure significantly affected levels of intentionality bias in their sample of french-speaking participants, suggesting there may well be some truth to this limitation.[8] It should be noted, however, that evidence in support of intentionality bias was also found in a study using visual stimuli, and therefore any linguistic limitations on intentionality bias do not undermine its existence.[7]

The existence of the intentionality bias has been disputed more generally[6], for example Hughes, Sandry and Trafimow's 2012 study, which replicated Study 1 of Rosset's original research but found no significant difference between the proportion of actions judged as intentional in the speeded versus unspeeded conditions.[9]

Current research

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Anger

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In his 2021 research, Baptiste Subra explored the effect of emotional state on intentionality bias.[2] In both studies, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions.[2] They were then required to write a quick essay on an event in their lives that had either caused them sadness (this condition was only in Study 1) or anger, or write about what an average day looks like for them (control condition).[2] After completing this task, participants made intentionality judgements for 50 sentences that described actions.[2]

Using a post-experiment questionnaire, it was confirmed that feelings of anger had been induced for participants in the anger condition, however this was not found for the sadness condition.[2] Subra's findings showed that intentionality bias was stronger for participants in the anger condition, as these judged a significantly higher proportion of action sentences as being intentional (45.1%) than the control group (37.6%).[2]

Subra acknowledged that the cognitive mechanisms underlying the relationship between anger and intentionality bias were not investigated, and therefore cannot be conclusively stated, and that this is a gap for follow-up research to fill.[2]

Participants whose cocktails contained alcohol showed a bias for intentional explanations

Alcohol

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In their 2010 study, Laurent Bègue et al. aimed to investigate whether alcohol consumption affects the strength of intentionality bias.[3] Participants were given the impression that the study's focus was taste-testing.[3] Under this guise, participants were given a cocktail to drink.[3] This contained alcohol for only half of participants.[3] Additionally only half of participants were led to believe they would consume alcohol, making it a 2x2 balanced placebo design.[3] 30 minutes after being given the cocktail, participants were required to make intentionality judgements of action sentences.[3]

Bègue et al. found that intentionality bias was stronger for inebriated participants, as those who had consumed alcohol judged a significantly higher proportion of action sentences as intentional than sober participants did.[3] The findings also indicated that the effect could not be explained by the placebo effect, as there was no significant difference between participants who believed they would consume alcohol versus those who did not.[3]

Bègue et al. proposed that alcohol exaggerates intentionality bias as it interferes with the additional cognitive processing required to overcome the bias and thereby reach an accidental explanation for actions.[3]

Even though excluded from subsequent analysis, one limitation of this research is that five participants admitted recognising that their cocktail did not match what they expected (i.e. they were able to tell there was alcohol in their "alcohol-free" cocktail, or vice versa).[3]

Cognitive empathy

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In their 2018 study, Rachel J.M. Slavny and James W. Moore aimed to see if differing levels of intentionality bias correlated with empathy.[4] Participants were required to make intentionality judgements for a series of sentences describing actions, as well as complete the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE).[4]

Slavny and Moore found that intentionality bias scores were significantly correlated with cognitive empathy, but not with affective empathy.[4] In their article introducing the QCAE, Reniers et al. defined cognitive empathy as "the ability to construct a working model of the emotional states of others" and affective empathy as "the ability to be sensitive to and vicariously experience the feelings of others".[10] Further analyses showed that of the sub-components of cognitive empathy, it was perspective taking ability that significantly correlated with higher levels of intentionality bias.[4]

Slavny and Moore suggest that perspective taking is correlated with intentionality bias as those who are better able to understand others' viewpoints are more likely to find wilful reasons why people would carry out an action.[4]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories were spread as well as the virus
Anthropomorphism in action: Many children's stories, such as Alice in Wonderland, feature animal characters that display human-like behaviour

Conspiracy theories

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In their 2015 research, Robert Brotherton and Cristopher C. French investigated whether those who display higher levels of intentionality bias are also more likely to believe conspiracy theories.[5] They also investigated whether intentionality bias was related to anthropomorphism, the tendency to perceive animals and/or inanimate objects as acting in a similarly deliberative way to humans.[5] The second study used the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs (GCB) scale to measure participant levels of conspiracist ideation.[5] Additionally, the third study used the Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism Questionnaire (IDAQ).[5]

Brotherton and French found that there was a significant positive relationship between the conspiracist ideation score and the number of actions judged as being performed intentional.[5] Therefore conspiracist ideation was shown to be related to higher levels of intentionality bias.[5] Conversely, no significant relationship was found between anthropomorphism and intentionality bias.[5]

Schizophrenia and schizotypy

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Schizophrenia

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In their 2014 study, Elodie Peyroux et al. investigated whether people with schizophrenia showed higher levels of intentionality bias than healthy controls.[6] Participants with schizophrenia were all hospital patients being medicated with anti-psychotics.[6] Each was matched with a healthy control by age, sex and years of education.[6] Participants made intentionality judgements on 72 action sentences.[6]

Peyroux et al. found that participants with schizophrenia rated a significantly higher proportion of actions as being done intentionally than the matched control group.[6] Therefore schizophrenia was shown to be related to higher levels of intentionality bias.[6]

Peyroux et al. proposed that high levels of intentionality bias are the root cause of the exaggerated intentionality judgements observed in individuals with schizophrenia who also experience persecutory delusions.[6]

Schizotypy

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Similarly, in their 2014 study James W. Moore and A. Pope sought to investigate whether schizotypy, "schizophrenia-like symptoms in healthy individuals", positively correlated with intentionality bias.[7] One advantage Moore and Pope emphasised was that by focussing on schizotypy instead of only diagnosable schizophrenic individuals, they would have access to a sample that was not affected or constrained by medicalisation.[7] Unlike other research, participants made intentionality judgements in response to visual stimuli (in the form of video clips) rather than linguistic ones.[7]

Moore and Pope found there was a significant positive relationship between measures of schizotypy and levels of intentionality bias.[7]

Applications

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Intentionality bias research has relevant applications in the areas of emotion[2], crime and law[1][3], individual differences[4][5][7], language[8], and mental health.[7][6]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak Rosset, Evelyn (2008). "It's no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations". Cognition. 108 (3): 771–780.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Subra, Baptiste (2021). "The effect of anger on intentionality bias". Aggressive Behavior. 47 (4): 464–471.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Bègue, Laurent; Bushman, Brad J.; Giancola, Peter R.; Subra, Baptiste; Rosset, Evelyn (2010). ""There Is No Such Thing as an Accident," Especially When People Are Drunk". Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin. 36 (10): 1301–1304.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h Slavny, Rachel J. M.; Moore, James W. (2018). "Individual differences in the intentionality bias and its association with cognitive empathy". Personality and Individual Differences. 122: 104–108.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Brotherton, Robert; French, Christopher C. (2015). "Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality". PLOS ONE. 10 (5).
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Peyroux, Elodie; Strickland, Brent; Tapiero, Isabelle; Franck, Nicolas (2014). "The intentionality bias in schizophrenia". Psychiatry Research. 219 (3): 426–430.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Moore, J. W.; Pope, A. (2014). "The intentionality bias and schizotypy". Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 67 (11): 2218–2224.
  8. ^ a b c Strickland, Brent; Fischer, M.; Peyroux, E.; Keil, F. (2011). "Syntactic Biases in Intentionality Judgments". Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 33: 601–606.
  9. ^ Hughes, Jamie S.; Sandry, Joshua; Trafimow, David (2012). "Intentional inferences are not more likely than unintentional ones: some evidence against the intentionality bias hypothesis". The Journal of Social Psychology. 152 (1): 1–4.
  10. ^ Reniers, Renate L. E. P.; Corcoran, Rhiannon; Drake, Richard; Shryane, Nick M.; Völlm, Birgit A. (2011). "The QCAE: a Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy". Journal of Personality Assessment. 93 (1): 84–95.