Belief–desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior,Do a

心理理论

Cognition 105 (2007) 184–194

http://doc.guandang.net/locate/COGNIT

Brief article

Belief–desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior: Do actions speak louder than words?

Annie E. Wertz, Tamsin C. German¤

Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, USAReceived 13 July 2006; accepted 8 August 2006

Abstract

The mechanisms underwriting our commonsense psychology, or ‘theory of mind’, havebeen extensively investigated via reasoning tasks that require participants to predict the actionof agents based on information about beliefs and desires. However, relatively few studies haveinvestigated the processes contributing to a central component of ‘theory of mind’ – our abilityto explain the action of agents in terms of underlying beliefs and desires. In two studies, wedemonstrate a novel phenomenon in adult belief–desire reasoning, capturing the folk notionthat ‘actions speak louder than words’. When story characters were described as searching inthe wrong place for a target object, adult subjects often endorsed mental state explanations ref-erencing a distracter object, but only when that object was approached. We discuss how thisphenomenon, alongside other reasoning “errors” (e.g., hindsight bias; the curse of knowledge)can be used to illuminate the architecture of domain speciWc belief–desire reasoning processes.© 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords:Theory of mind; Explanation; Attribution; Belief–desire reasoning

“If we could do that well with predicting the weather, no one would ever get hisfeet wet; and yet the etiology of the weather must surely be child’s play comparedwith the causes of behavior” (Fodor, 1987, p. 4).

*This manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Jacques Mehler.Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 805 893 5618; fax: +1 805 893 4303.

E-mail address: german@psych.ucsb.edu (T.C. German).

心理理论

A.E. Wertz, T.C. German / Cognition 105 (2007) 184–194185

According to naïve belief–desire psychology (e.g., Davidson, 1963; Dennett, 1987;Fodor, 1987),1 agents’ actions are caused by two broad classes of mental folk con-structs: beliefs and desires. Davidson (1963) argued that actions are caused by reasons– pairings of two types of mental state (or ‘propositional attitude’). ‘Pro’ attitudes,such desires for objects, motivate action. ‘Cognitive’ attitudes constrain the details ofthat action: where or how it will take place. If we know a person has a reason for aparticular action (e.g., the desire for x and the belief that x is in location A), we canpredict the action. Conversely, knowing about an action (e.g., search at location A),allows the generation of reasons that might have caused it (e.g., desire for x and thebelief that x is located at A).

Research into our commonsense capacity to understand the actions of others viabelief–desire reasoning has been largely undertaken from a developmental perspec-tive (though see also Amodio & Frith, 2006; Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004), focus-ing on the capacity to predict actions from information about desires and beliefs. In aclassic task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985) preschool participants meet Sally,who leaves her marble in one location before departing, at which time Ann moves themarble to another location. On Sally’s return, the child must predict where she willlook for the marble. This task shows reliable improvement across the preschoolyears. Three-year-old children tend to predict that Sally will search in the locationactually containing the marble, while 4-year-olds more often predict that Sally willsearch where she thinks the marble is – in the now empty location (Wellman, Cross, &Watson, 2001).

Models of the processes contributing to belief–desire reasoning in action predic-tion have recently emerged (Friedman & Leslie, 2004a, 2004b; German & Hehman,2006; Leslie, German, & Polizzi, 2005; Leslie & Polizzi, 1998). However, despite thecentral importance of explanation of action in ‘theory of mind’, developmental inves-tigations of belief–desire explanation tasks have been few and far between (e.g., Bart-sch & Wellman, 1989; Moses & Flavell, 1990; Wimmer & Mayringer, 1998) andstudies of belief–desire explanation in adults, models of which must eventually con-strain all developmental theories, even rarer.

One framework for interpreting action prediction tasks is the two component the-ory of belief–desire reasoning proposed by Leslie and colleagues (e.g., Leslie, Fried-man, & German, 2004). According to this view, belief–desire reasoning is based inpart on a neurocognitive mechanism that takes as input information about thebehavior of social agents and generates candidate representations that might havecontributed to this behavior. A second mechanism has the task of selecting amongthe candidate mental states (see German & Hehman, 2006; Leslie etal., 2004; Yazdi,German, Defeyter, & Siegal, 2006, for more discussion). While extensive work hasassessed the nature of selection processing in prediction tasks (Friedman & Leslie,2004a, 2004b; Leslie etal., 2005), the idea that speciWc mental state representationsmight be spontaneously generated from information about behavior of social agents

The term ‘naïve’ is used here to distinguish everyday psychology from products of scientiWc psycholog-ical investigation. As Fodor (1987) argues, everyday psychology is anything but naïve in terms of itssuccess.1

心理理论

186A.E. Wertz, T.C. German / Cognition 105 (2007) 184–194

has not been tested directly by researchers adopting this framework. However, anextensive literature in social psychology has shown that causal explanations (attribu-tions) of social behavior are often (i) focused on inte …… 此处隐藏：28101字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……