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How the Mind Explains Behavior Folk Explanations,
Meaning, and Social Interaction
Bertram F. Malle
Cambridge,
MA & London: MIT Press, 2004 Hardcover. 328
pages. ISBN 0-262134454. $38
Reviewed by Craig Hamilton University of California at Irvine
How do we explain the behavior of others? To reflect on someone’s
behavior is to enter the world of social cognition, since behavior explanations
are a tool for making sense of how or why people behave as they do. This is
just one of the many points that Bertram Malle clearly and confidently makes in
his fascinating new book, How the Mind
Explains Behavior : Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction.
Even if we are mistaken in our explanations of how others behave, the fact that
we search for answers reveals a persistent need to understand our social world.
Malle, a psychologist at the University of Oregon’s Institute for Cognitive and
Decision Sciences, has certainly made a worthwhile contribution to his field
here. Although this book might have been called How People Explain Behavior (given the fact that the explanations
Malle often refers to are actual—rather than invented—ones offered by his
subjects), by placing “mind” in
the title Malle highlights the cognitive and conceptual regularities that
support behavior explanations across a range of settings. Because life is short
and there is never enough time in a day to read all the books one would like
to, the conscientious reviewer can do no more than explain this book’s main
ideas and hope that readers will want to learn more by reading the book itself! Malle begins with a simple yet bold confession in his preface: “The
ideas that found expression here were first inspired by Jerry Bruner’s
magnificent book Acts of Meaning and
a seminar held by Fred Dretske and Michael Bratman at Stanford University on
action explanation. Thereafter, nothing in the attribution literature meant
quite the same for me again” [vii]. What are the rhetorical effect of these
statements? To establish Malle’s ethos as a credible scholar who keeps company
with important thinkers in elite universities, and to imply that we are reading
a conversion narrative where one way of training in psychology is abandoned for
another. In Chapter 1, Malle goes on to suggest that he is only picking up
where other eminent psychologists have left off, which is another rhetorical
strategy that may seem superficially self-effacing but which nevertheless
succeeds in preparing readers for the innovative discussion that will follow.
Malle begins with a review of the literature, discusses previous research on
behavior explanations and attribution theory (especially Heider’s work), and
along the way points out two distinctions that have compelled him to write this
book. First, there is the person-situation distinction, which made earlier
psychologists attribute behavior either to (internal) causes located within a person or to (external) causes found in situations. But for Malle, when “two
explanation types—reason explanations (motive attribution) and enabling factor
explanations [outcome attributions]—answer such different questions, it is
unfortunate that the attribution literature after Heider collapsed them into
one” [11-12]. Malle’s initial aim thus seems to be to keep alive distinctions
between motive and outcome attributions. Second, to erase the distinction
between unintentional and intentional behavior, and at the same time propose
different theories for how people explain two types of behavior, is to create
confusion where clarity is needed according to Malle. Explaining behavior appears to start with an act of categorization: is
an action unintentional and caused impersonally (e.g. sneezing), or intentional
and caused personally (e.g. calling a friend) [8]? Malle, however, maintains
that strict adherence to a person-or-situation causal model oversimplifies
attribution theory and “does not tell the whole story of behavior explanations”
[30]. Rather than simply resuscitate the reputation of attribution theory for
the sake of correcting the errors of textbooks, Malle tells us at the end of
Chapter 1 that he wants to do more than this. Specifically, Malle would like to
examine “a conceptual framework called the
folk theory of mind and behavior” [26; italics in original], a framework
that applies to intentional and
unintentional behavior. Malle devotes Chapter 2 to the folk theory of mind and
behavior, which is the “conceptual
framework that guide’s people’s cognition of behavior and the mind” and
which he sometimes refers to as “theory
of mind” [31; italics in original]. Agents, intentions, reasons, beliefs,
and desires are key concepts in this framework, and Malle explains how the
theory of mind relates to mental problems like autism and simulation theory
(often assumed to be the rival hypothesis to the theory of mind). He also
discusses the concept of projection (a building block of simulation theory),
recognizing that it usually means “other = self” [34]. This equation would describe
why cynics believe nobody: they project their self-image onto others and
because they skeptically distrust themselves they then skeptically distrust
whatever else they see. Malle’s argument, however, is that those who promote
either simulation theory or the theory of mind theory (often called
“theory-theory,” for short) overlook the fact that “what the two have in common
is that they focus on the psychological mechanisms of mental state ascription
more so than on the conceptual framework that underpins it [and is] typically
presupposed” [35]. Malle has a talent for uncovering these presuppositions,
which is why both sides should listen to him. The followers of cognitive science will also recognize Malle’s section
in Chapter 2 on the evolution of the theory of mind. While discussions of this
type may border on speculation, after Darwin it seems that all scientists must
be naturalists. By that I mean many scientists may have come to assume that to
explain why something exists or how it functions entails explaining its
evolution (i.e. where it comes from and how it got that way) even when the
entity is a form of human behavior. Malle follows a path here familiar to many
cognitive scientists in the age of evolutionary psychology, and they probably
will not disagree with Malle’s view of the “five candidate precursors” to the
theory of mind in the cognitive evolution of homo sapiens [51]. Those candidates were [i] “the capacity for
imitation” and a “noninferential form of empathy;” [ii] “a primitive form of
introspection (far from full-blown self-consciousness)”; [iii] understanding
another’s “directedness to an
object”; [iv] the “ability to appropriately parse the behavior stream into
intention-relevant units”; and [v] joint attention, or realizing “that self and
another person are both directed at the same object” [52-53]. To his credit,
Malle ends the chapter by relating what he has said about the theory of mind to
explanations of behavior. He does so by noting that models of behavior
explanation that confuse so-called mechanical causation with intentional
causation obscure the fact that our “folk concept of intentionality” [61] is
rooted in these conceptualizations of causation. Even though it is only in
Chapter 4 that Malle presents us with a line drawing to help us visualize the
folk concept of intentionality [89], his point here is that our
conceptualizations of causation enable our explanations of behavior. In Chapter 3, Malle turns his attention to why and when people
explain behavior. Malle follows Bruner in seeing life as a quest for meaning,
and he correctly refers to our drive for seeking clarifications in the face of
cognitive dissonance (e.g. unmet expectations in what Bruner once called
“canonical” situations). But regarding the “human tendency to find
significance” [67], Malle goes one step further. He argues that how we explain
and find meaningful the behavior of other people is also how we explain and
find meaningful most things in this world. “Finding meaning” is vital to
Malle’s model for it defines one of only two motivations for explanations of
behavior (managing social interactions is the other motivation). In
communication, for example, subjects voluntarily offered behavior explanations
to their interlocutors without being asked to do so explicitly in 97% of the
cases studied. That means explanations were offered in response to wh-questions in only 3% of cases (i.e.
15 of 451), a finding that reveals how producing explanations involves
perceptions of an interlocutor’s implicit anticipations. The pragmatic and
social nature of behavior explanations is addressed later in the book although
Malle writes in detail in Chapter 3 about four event types: [i]
intentional/observable actions; [ii]
unintentional/observable behaviors;
[iii] intentional/observable thoughts;
and [iv] unintentional/unobservable experiences.
Data from interpersonal transactions suggest that actions and experiences occur
as themes in conversations more frequently than is the case with either
behaviors or thoughts. The fact that we talk more often about actions and experiences, than we do about behaviors
or thoughts, suggests to Malle that
we spend more time explaining certain “behavioral events” at the expense of
others. Malle is even more correct here than he realizes. Linguists analyzing
conversations in CANCODE (the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in
English) could show Malle that one of our favorite topics of conversation is
other people’s business, including why they behave how they behave (especially
regarding the speaker). For Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, Malle puts forward his theory of behavior
explanations by dividing it into two major parts: conceptual structure and
psychological construction. The elegance of Malle’s model is in the details. He
distinguishes intentional from unintentional behavior, and carefully
demonstrates that there are three modes we use to explain intentional behavior:
reasons, causal history of reasons explanations (a cumbersome term Malle often
shortens to CHRs), and enabling factor explanations [91]. For example, if the
question “Why did you go running?” is answered “Um, because I wanted to get in
better shape, and [...] I figured that I can do that by going running every
day” [93], then a reason is used to explain an intentional behavior. Malle’s
brilliant insight is that the difference between reasons and CHRs “has nothing
to do with the classic person-situation dichotomy” [103]. For instance, if the
question “Why was Nina using drugs?” is answered “She was at a party,” then we
have evidence of causal factors outside the agent being evoked to answer the
question. The behavior may be intentional, but the explanation of the behavior
is not a reason; rather, it is a CHR. This is not to say that there is only one
way to explain intentional behavior. On the contrary, if we read that “By
choice, Ian worked 14 hours a day last month,” and we say in return that he did
so either “To make more money” (reason explanation) or because “He is driven to
achieve” (CHR), then we have offered two different kinds of explanation for the
very same intentional behavior [104]. While Malle jokes about the chicken
crossing the road, he argues at length that enabling factor explanations are
commonly used to explain difficult actions. If reasons or CHRs are insufficient
for us to explain why a student got a perfect score on a math exam, then we may
offer “He’s a stats whiz” as an enabling factor explanation to account for the
student’s behavior in a more satisfactory manner [110]. Although Malle has
fewer things to say about unintentional behavior in Chapter 4, his summary here
persuasively defends his folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanations by
arguing that it accounts for data in a way that the standard tools of
attribution theory cannot. I suspect this is the point that psychologists will
most appreciate it if they have their doubts about attribution theory. When it comes to psychological construction, Malle quickly introduces a
shopping analogy in order to demonstrate, thanks to a flow chart [119], that
behavior explanations involve many choices in much the same way that a shopper
at supermarket might also make choices. Here Malle discusses specific causes
and factors in reasons, CHRs, and enabling factor explanations in order to
clarify in three ways of explaining behavior rather than the standard two
(internal reasons versus external enabling factors). What Malle is uncovering
for us are the cognitive processes or “principles that guide the psychological
construction of explanations” [145], processes that include knowledge
structures, simulation or projection, covariation, direct recall, and
rationalization [143]. These processes are examined in depth again in Chapter 6 when Malle
studies the pragmatics of explanations. The social nature of behavior
explanations is clear when it comes to explaining socially desirable behavior
versus socially undesirable behavior. For instance, based on experimental
results such as “I slapped my mom. Why?
I was really angry and frustrated” [160], Malle found that people use CHRs like
these 42% of the time when explaining undesirable actions, compared to using
CHRs 22% of the time to explain socially desirable actions [161]. This is why a
CHR is seen as a “mitigating device” [163] used extensively during “impression
management,” which is one way to define the behavior explanations that actors
and observers offer to others. For example, in the case of Syria's Interior
Minister Ghazi Kanaan, who allegedly committed suicide on 12 October 2005, I
suspect Malle’s findings would lead us to predict that CHRs will be used
extensively to explain a socially undesirable action like suicide. Clearly,
Malle’s findings have an incredibly wide range of application. For their part,
sociolinguists might also take an interest in Chapter 6 in Malle’s study of
interpersonal verbs and discourse analysis based on the fact that mental state
markers really matter to the pragmatics of explaining behavior. For instance,
suppose “Cliff asks Jerry: ‘Why did your girlfriend refuse dessert?’ Jerry
responds by saying: ‘She thinks she’s been gaining weight’ vs. ‘She’s been gaining weight’” [168]. The verb “thinks” in the
first reply marks a mental state while in the second reply the mental state is
unmarked, a difference with an immediately visible social impact. Malle later
adds that whereas actors often begin with unmarked explanations, observers
often begin with marked explanations [183], a finding that should interest
narratologists who study thought reports in literary texts. Malle turns his attention to explaining the behavior of self and others
in Chapter 7, and the behavior of individual and groups in Chapter 8. Just as
we learned in previous chapters that there were differences in how we explain
behavior that is good or bad, intentional or unintentional, in Chapter 7 Malle
argues that people as “observers are biased toward assuming intentionality for
harmful behaviors” [177]. In other words, when a bad thing happens we usually
explain it by assuming someone intentionally caused it to occur. “Accidents
don’t just happen,” as a popular public service announcement for the reduction
of car accidents in America used to put it, and our intentionality bias compels
us to accept this statement as true. But Malle defends our bias as follows:
“Consider the enormous costs of falsely assuming that an explosion was an
industrial accident when in fact it was a deliberate terrorist attack” [177].
While the intentionality bias might explain the psychological roots of
conspiracy theories, a desire to avoid the costs of making the wrong assumption
was apparent, for example, among French citizens who refused to believe that
the AFZ factory explosion in Toulouse on 21 September 2001 was an accident. But
for Malle the bias is only one part of the picture; the other part involves the
“actor-observer asymmetry.” An analysis of 4000 explanations shows that actors
offer more reasons than observers do to explain intentional behaviors, while
observers offer more CHRs than actors do to explain intentional behaviors
[178]. This asymmetry, however, should not obscure the fact that actors and
observers still have something in common: they offer more reasons than CHRs for
explaining intentional behavior. Ideas like these help Malle argue that
psychologists can no longer use one distinction (e.g. the person-situation
dichotomy) to account accurately for another (e.g. the actor-observer
asymmetry) when the two distinctions are not related. If Malle is consistent in
arguing that attribution theory has its limits, he is equally consistent in
arguing that the person-dichotomy also has its explanatory limits. After discussing self and other, in Chapter 8 Malle moves onto
individuals and groups in order to test his “working hypothesis”: “People use
their folk theory of mind to make sense of groups just as they use this folk
theory to make sense of individuals” [194]. One of the problems here, of
course, is that “people interact less with groups than they talk about them,”
and this is especially true of aggregate groups [208]. Whereas aggregate groups
include individuals who act in similar ways without coordinating their actions
(e.g. “High school seniors in the US vandalize school property”), jointly
acting groups may function more coherently (e.g. “Seniors at Irvine High School
vandalized school property this year”). Just as we distinguish intentional from
unintentional behavior, so too do we distinguish aggregate group behavior from
jointly acting group behavior. We do so by offering more CHRs (about 45%) to
explain intentional aggregate group actions than for explaining individual
(about 30%) or jointly acting group actions (about 20%) [206-208]. Despite
these differences, however, Malle’s point is that we analogically reason about
groups in much the same way we reason about individuals: we ascribe intentionality
and agency to groups just as we ascribe intentionality and agency to
individuals [194-197]. In other words, just as we attribute mental states to
separate people, so too do we attribute them to groups in the belief that
groups have minds too. Political theorists familiar with the work of Charles
Beitz will recognize the implications of Malle’s findings for the analysis of
international relations, especially the Hobbesian question of whether or not
the state of nature that applies for individuals can also apply (analogically)
to groups like nation-states. Finally, although Malle admits the data from
psychological experiments regarding stereotypes are still inconclusive, he
nevertheless ends the chapter by mentioning the fact that research on
stereotypes in the future might produce findings that can be useful to
psychologists interested in explanations of group behavior and the
generalizations we make about stereotyped groups. For his conclusion, in Chapter 9, Malle reminds us that behavior
explanations are cognitive tools that provide meaning and social tools that
manage interactions. Malle also reminds us that his theory contains three
levels: the conceptual, the psychological or cognitive, and the linguistic.
These levels complicate the views offered by the dichotomies of attribution
theory, but Malle argues it is necessary to change’s one view when confronted
with data that attribution theory simply cannot account for in any satisfactory
manner. However, as Malle realistically and honestly concedes, “Revolutions
rarely happen in social psychology” [225], so he is aware of just how difficult
it will be for the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanation to supplant
the more popular and better established attribution theory of behavior
explanation. Historians of science, of course, are familiar with such moments
in time where competing scientific theories result in incommensurability and
practitioners find themselves forced with a choice: to stick with the old way
of doing things or to adopt an altogether new approach to their object of
study. For his part, Malle thinks that social psychologists can no longer
ignore current developments in cognitive science, especially when those
developments have major implications for theories of behavior explanations. Only
time will tell if cognitive science is indeed the future of social psychology.
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