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

心理理论

Cognition 105 (2007) 184–194

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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).

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