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What do I think you're doing? Action identification and mind attribution.

Megan N Kozak1, Abigail A Marsh, Daniel M Wegner

  • 1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. mkozak@roosevelt.edu

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|May 3, 2006
PubMed
Summary

People perceive actions differently based on their thoughts about the target person. How we identify actions is linked to whether we attribute intentionality and cognition to others, influencing social perception.

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Area of Science:

  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Person Perception

Background:

  • Understanding how individuals perceive and interpret the actions of others is fundamental to social interaction.
  • The relationship between action identification and the attribution of mental states (mind attribution) is a key area in social cognition research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the covariation between a perceiver's identification of a target person's actions and their attributions of mind to that target.
  • To explore how factors such as target likability, misfortune, and perspective-taking influence action identification and mind attribution.

Main Methods:

  • The study employed a series of five experiments (Studies 1-5).
  • Methods involved participants identifying target actions at different levels of abstraction (high-level effects vs. low-level details).

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  • Participants also made attributions of intentionality and cognition to target individuals across various experimental conditions.

    • Main Results:

    • Action identification level (high-level vs. low-level) is associated with attributions of intentionality and cognition.
    • Both action identification and mind attribution were higher for liked targets and reduced for targets experiencing misfortune.
    • Positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions for liked targets and the self, with the reverse for disliked targets.
    • Perspective-taking instructions influenced action identification but not mind attribution.

    Conclusions:

    • The level at which an action is identified is closely linked to the degree to which a target person is attributed with mental states.
    • Social factors like likability and target outcomes significantly modulate both action identification and mind attribution.
    • These findings highlight the interconnectedness of perceiving actions and inferring mental states in social perception.