Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), bu...

The "intentionality bias" refers to our automatic tendency to judge other people's actions to be intentional. In this experiment we extended research on this effect in two key ways. First, we developed a novel nonlinguistic task for assessing the intentionality bias. This task used video stimuli of ambiguous movements. Second, we investigated the relationship between the strength of this bias a...

Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives...

Young children’s pretend play is considered in the context of the development of collective intentionality. It is argued that (i) early pretending is an essentially social and culturally acquired form of action, and (ii) early social pretend play can be considered as the first form of true collective intentionality in ontogeny – involving shared cooperative activities and even some rudimentary ...

Malingering is defined as an intentional social act of simulating or exaggerating illness. However, determinations of intentionality are often met with suspicion, and among experts in malingering nobody quite likes to make intentionality judgements. A serious medical, legal, and political management of malingering, however, must confront the problem of intentionality. Both malingerers (in plann...