Syntax and intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind

Abstract

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), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially symmetric sentence (e.g., “John exchanged products with Susan”). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence.

When and Why We See Victims as Responsible

“…In other work, increased focus on victims placed in the role of grammatical subject through the use of the passive voice (e.g., X was assaulted by Y) corresponded with increased perception of victims' causal responsibility (Bohner, 2001). Complementarily, an automatic intentionality bias was observed for syntactic subjects (Strickland, Fisher, Keil, & Knobe, 2014): When participants made speeded judgments of intentionality for agents in the subject role for interpersonal events indicating little if any intentionality (e.g., X came upon Y), participants attributed significantly higher levels of intentionality to the subject, compared with when they gave the event careful thought. Together, these findings invite the question of whether links between ideology and attitudes toward victims might be accounted for by more basic factors like cognitive focus as manipulated via language use and subsequent effects on perceptions of responsibility.…”

Double dissociation of neural responses supporting perceptual and cognitive components of social cognition: Evidence from processing of others' pain

“…We implemented a design in which perceptual (i.e., pictures of faces with either painful or neutral expressions) and contextual information (i.e., sentences describing either a painful or neutral contexts) were orthogonally manipulated (see Figure 1 ). The domain of language is strictly related to the cognitive component of social cognition and ToM 3 33 34 35 36 37 and strong evidence supporting this claim comes from studies on deaf children who usually present delays in reasoning about intentions and desires 38 39 40 41 42 43 . In this vein, the contextual information provided by sentences in the present study would require high level cognitive processing.…”

Alternative causal explanations for order break the link between order and agents

“…When people are put under cognitive load -either by performing additional simultaneous tasks, or by adding pressure to complete the task quickly -people often shift from rational, conscious reasoning to simpler, more biased heuristics (Kelemen, Rottman & Seston, 2013;Strickland, Fisher, Keil & Knobe, 2014). The current experiments suggest that under typical conditions, the link between order and agents is a product of rational inference, not simple heuristics.…”