Belief–desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior,Do actions speak louder than words(4)

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 internal dispositions of actors (seeSmith, 1994, for a review), and that (ii) inferences about internal traits can be madespontaneously and unknowingly (Winter & Uleman, 1984).

In the experiments reported here, we extend this work to address how speciWcmental state representations (e.g., belief/desire representations) are generated inresponse to a speciWc aspect of social behavior. Adult participants received scenariosbased on the false belief task, extended to include the characters’ mistaken search.Two types of scenario diVered in terms of the mental state representations predictedto be generated in response to the search action. The presence of these diVerent men-tal state representations in the cognitive system was assessed via requiring subjects toendorse or reject candidate explanations for the search action.

In the experimental scenarios, the false belief scenario was altered by including asecond object (hereafter the ‘distracter’ object) at the location where the characterleaves her desired object (hereafter the ‘target’ object). When the character searchesfor the target object, her action is directed at a location that contains the distracterobject. The control scenarios were identical except that the distracter object was inthe second location, such that the character searches an empty location on her return.

We predicted that mental states referencing the distracter object would be gener-ated in the cognitive system in response to the search action, and would enter into theexplanation process in the experimental conditions only. In Experiment 1, we testedfor the presence mental states referencing desires about the distracter object. Thisshould manifest as errors in rejecting this kind of explanation, as compared withendorsing or rejecting other explanations consistent with the story.

Experiment 1

Method

Participants

Sixty Wve adults (41 females and 24 males, mean age 19) participated for classcredit. Participants were randomly assigned to either the ‘action toward distracterobject’ (ADO) condition (ND34) or ‘action toward empty location’ (AE) condition(ND31). The proportion of males to females in each condition was approximatelyequivalent.

Design and materials

Participants were presented with a series of 40 text-based reasoning tasks. Alltasks consisted of stories involving two agents, two objects and two locations. Eachshort story described a scenario in which character 1 places a target object in onelocation and then leaves. At this time character 2 moves the target object to a secondlocation. On her return, character 1 approaches the initial (wrong) location toretrieve the target object. For each task, the story was followed by one candidate

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