Is there a Hierarchy of Social Inference? Intentionality, Mind, and Morality

每当人们遇到另一个人的行为时，他们必须处理大量令人眼花缭乱的信息：这个人的性别、年龄、角色、社会群体成员是什么？这种行为是有意的吗？这个人的目标是什么，她的想法是什么，他的感受是什么？这种行为是好还是坏？它能揭示这个人的性格吗？这些问题的答案需要社会推理：对另一个人的故意行为、思想和感情以及道德的猜测。以前的研究已经对这些推论提供了一些见解，但它们总是分开研究的。在现实生活中，不同类型的社会推理同时发生在人类感知者的内部，在研究中也必须同时进行研究。因此，这个项目的第一个目标是调查这些多重推论之间的关系。是否存在社会推理的等级制度——即人们推断意图、思想和道德的优先顺序？（例如，人们会在推断出某人的具体目标之前就指责他吗？）这些推论的频率有多高，速度有多快，一些推论是否会相互竞争或相互加速？（例如，关于目标的推论是否比关于个性的推论快？关于意向性的推论是否会加快关于责备的推论？）该项目的第二个目标是调查观察到的行为中包含的哪些信息会触发各种推断——也就是说，当人们推断行为的意向性、行为者的情绪或行为的应受谴责性时，他们究竟会看什么？为了进行这项研究，PI开发了一个理论模型和实验范式，用于同时检查多种社会推断。与以前的研究使用书面句子来引出社会推断不同，本项目将录下的人类行为作为动态实验刺激。因此，当感知者像在现实生活中一样做出社会推断时，研究人员使用计算机演示和测量来评估这些推断的频率和准确时间。此外，在观察行为时，通过对感知者眼球运动的细粒度跟踪，研究人员可以捕捉到这些推断所依据的具体信息。通过更清晰地了解涉及推断意向性、精神状态和道德的基本社会能力，该项目将为法律程序、自闭症模型（这些能力已被证明不足的地方）、关系咨询和跨文化交流提供信息。阐明人们解释彼此行为的确切过程将有助于应对当代社会的一个关键挑战：改善沟通，避免个人、商业和政治互动中的误解。此外，该提案在理论和方法上的创新将为科学家研究人类社会认知提供有价值的新工具。最后，由于许多拟议的研究可以在便携式笔记本电脑上进行，因此它们允许招募通常不会进入心理学家实验室的不同社区成员。拟议的研究将纳入本科生和研究生的培训和教学，受益于国家和国际合作，并将在科学出版物和跨多个学科的社区中传播。

Whenever people encounter another person's behavior, they have to process a bewildering amount of information: What is the person's gender, age, role, social group membership? Is the behavior intentional? What is the person's goal, what is she thinking, what is he feeling? Is this behavior good or bad? And does it reveal the person's personality? Answers to these questions demand social inferences: conjectures about the other person's intentional behavior, thoughts and feelings, and morality. Previous research has provided some insight into each of these inferences, but they were always studied in separation. In real life, different types of social inferences occur simultaneously within the human perceiver and must also be studied simultaneously in research. This project's first objective is therefore to investigate the relationships among these multiple inferences. Is there a hierarchy of social inferences -- a priority by which people infer intentionality, mind, and morality? (For example, do people assign blame to somebody even before they infer the person's specific goal?) How frequently and how fast are these inferences made, and do some inferences compete with each other or speed each other up? (For example, are inferences about goals faster than those about personality and do inferences of intentionality speed up inferences about blame?) The project's second objective is to investigate which information contained in an observed behavior triggers the various inferences -- that is, exactly what do people look at when they infer a behavior's intentionality, the actor's emotion, or the blameworthiness of the action? To conduct this research, the PI developed a theoretical model and experimental paradigm for the simultaneous examination of multiple social inferences. Unlike previous research that used written sentences to elicit social inferences, the present project presents videotaped human behaviors as dynamic experimental stimuli. Thus, while perceivers make social inferences as they normally would in real life, the researcher uses computerized presentation and measurement to assess the frequency and exact timing of these inferences. Moreover, with a fine-grained tracking of the perceiver's eye movements while watching the behaviors, the researcher can capture the specific information on which these inferences are based. By providing a clearer understanding of the fundamental social capacities involved in inferring intentionality, mental states, and morality, this project will inform legal processes, models of autism (where these capacities have been shown to be deficient), relationship counseling, and cross-cultural communication. Illuminating the exact processes by which people interpret each other's behavior will help meet a key challenge in contemporary society: to improve communication and avoid misunderstandings in personal, business, and political interactions. Furthermore, the theoretical and methodological innovations in this proposal will provide scientists with valuable new tools for the study of human social cognition. Finally, because many of the proposed studies can be conducted on a portable laptop computer, they permit recruitment of diverse community members who would normally not enter the psychologist's laboratory. The proposed research will be integrated into training and teaching of undergraduate and graduate students, benefit from national and international collaborations, and will be disseminated in scientific publications and communities across multiple disciplines.