Anyway, the article begins thusly:
How do we think about the intentional nature of actions? And how do people with an impaired mindreading capacity think about it?
Consider the following probes:
The Free-Cup Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, ‘I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?
The Extra-Dollar Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, ‘I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?
Curious, I mentally recorded my responses to both scenarios before checking to see what a given response set actually supposedly meant.
(Try it yourself if you like - scroll down when you've decided on your responses)
After presenting the scenarios, the article continues:
You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people (Machery, 2008).
Now that surprised me. Not only because of the presumption of what the reader "surely" thinks, but because, well, I didn't actually think paying the dollar was intentional, while getting the cup was not.
As I read the descriptions of both scenarios, it seemed clear to me that Joe's intention in either case was to acquire the largest available smoothie.
Hence, I answered "No" both to the question of whether he intentionally obtained the commemerative cup, and to the question of whether he intentionally paid an extra dollar.
And...apparently, according to the authors, this is actually the predicted "autistic" response:
But Tiziana Zalla and I have found that if you had Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, your judgments would be very different: You would judge that paying an extra-dollar was not intentional, just like getting the commemorative cup (Zalla and Machery ms).
Leaving aside diagnostic category nitpicking for the moment, and noting that I don't think a person's responses to the smoothie scenarios are definitively diagnostic of anything, the above quoted statement does apply in my case, and apparently applied for a significant percentage of autistic study participants.
That said, I am really having a hard time seeing how "mindreading" has anything to do with how a person processes the scenario. I strongly suspect that this is more a matter of how a person processes language. It makes sense that in a language-based task, you're going to get trends in how autistic and nonautistic people respond, but very rarely do I see this being examined -- it's a lot more common to see people hypothesizing about "Theory of Mind deficits" and whatnot in response to findings such as this.
When I read the scenarios, I mapped them both something like this:
- Joe wants A.
- In order to get A, Joe must accept B.
- Joe really wants A, so he accepts B.
As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what "B" is -- in either case, it's a condition Joe must accept in order to get the thing he wants. Hence, while Joe is going to end up with B (whether it be a fancy cup or a wallet one dollar lighter), it cannot be said that he went to the smoothie counter intending to get a fancy cup or pay an extra dollar. He went there to get the biggest smoothie they had, and that's what he got.
Now, if you asked instead, "Was Joe responsible for the act of acquiring the commemorative cup or spending the extra dollar?", I would say "Yes" -- for both cases.
While (as I stated above), I don't see Joe as having intended to accept the extra condition, it was still his "fault" that he ended up with the special cup / paid an extra dollar.
He could have, after all, decided the cup was really ugly to the point where he chose a different drink entirely in order to avoid it. He could have decided he didn't want to pay an extra dollar after all, and compromised with a smaller smoothie (or again, a different drink).
So in both cases, he was responsible for what he actually ended up with, as he knew the parameters of the situation going in, and chose accordingly. But that does not mean, by my assessment, that he intended to acquire the cup or spend the dollar; those were just "side effects".
This is where I think the language stuff is probably coming into play. I am guessing that many people are probably equating "Joe intentionally acquired B" with "Joe was responsible for acquiring B", whereas I make a distinction between those two assertions. Not a moral distinction, mind you, but a linguistic/conceptual one. But (at least based on many of the comments attached to the article), it seems that if someone doesn't make such a distinction, they may in turn judge "passive" actions (Joe accepts the commemorative cup) as distinct from "active" actions (Joe hands over an extra dollar).
And...none of this seems to have any bearing whatsoever on whether someone is "seeing things from Joe's point of view". For one thing, we don't know hardly anything about Joe, except for the fact that he wants a large smoothie, and wants it badly. For another thing, he's a fictional character in a story problem, not a three-dimensional human being or animal (and, yes, contrary to stereotypes, I do like fiction and can relate to some fictional characters -- but they have to be fleshed out somewhat better than Joe).
So, again, there's definitely some language weirdness going on in the presumptions about this problem. The only thing I see as passingly relevant to "theory of mind" seems to be the inherent presumption that people will, in the absence of knowing much of anything about Joe aside from his smoothie hankering, project their own default mental maps onto him and determine his intentions on that basis.
I was surprised to learn, for instance, that some people who read the problem saw the receipt of the commemorative cup as a "bonus" of some kind, and that this figured into there intentionality assessment. Personally when I saw the phrase "commemorative cup" I pictured some annoying gaudy thing I probably wouldn't want, and so if I were going to project anything onto Joe, it would be my own irritation with florid promotional items. But I didn't do that, because, well, I'm not Joe.
Additionally, the first time I read through the problem (before reading any interpretations or responses from other people) I had a distinct impression of Joe's "intentions" as being the intention he had when he entered the store to buy the large smoothie. The other variables that came up were simply irrelevant; the fact that there were now one or more conditions attached to the acquisition of the large smoothie didn't change the reason Joe had entered the store in the first place. So I guess I attached some kind of temporality to Joe's intentions, in addition to interpreting the language used in the problem the way I've described.
I'm very curious to know how other folks interpret scenarios like this. Again, I do NOT take this very seriously, least of all as a diagnostic instrument -- but I do think the discussions surrounding this sort of thing are quite illuminating when it comes to the assumptions that tend to get made about autistic cognition, language use, and human cognition in general.
EDIT: This post (which is actually linked at the bottom of the "Intentional Action and Asperger Syndrome" article) seems to concur with the assertion that language interpretation issues are probably a primary factor in how people respond to questions like those in the smoothie problem.
19 comments:
Anne,
I'm with you, in neither case did he intend the outcome, what he intended was to get the biggest cup they had and the other issues were incidental to his intentions.
Given work has just put me through a whole lot of psychological testing, including Emotional Intelligence tests (for what they are worth), and I tested quite high on EI, this seems like a pretty poor test.
Serious psych testing involves many questions, so to try and use any one question as a diagnostic tool for anything as complex as determining the mental/emotional state of a mind seems pretty spurious to me
Martin: Yeah, I agree it's a pretty poor test -- the main thing I find interesting about it is the way the authors just sort of presumed that when people answered a certain way, it meant something deep and meaningful about their "mind reading" ability. When I think if it says anything, it says something about the way a person defines certain words, which is an entirely separate thing. I think people forget that when you're running a test, the media/method by which the test is administered *matters*, and it can matter rather a *lot*.
I mean seriously, I read a while back that deaf people used to be declared "feeble-minded" (and institutionalized) routinely because of poor performance on intelligence tests that were based on *spoken language*.
Re. psychological testing: I've undergone a fair amount of that myself having taken the Weschler intelligence scale at age 4, again at age 20, along with the MMPI, a verbal fluency test, sentence completion, Woodcock Johnson psychoeducational battery, and probably a few others as well.
Some of these tests provided useful or at least interesting information (e.g., on verbal fluency it was revealed that my vocabulary exceeded my ability to actually get words out quickly, and on sentence completion I tended to be atypically concrete in my responses), but some of those I'd even question the utility of. Like the MMPI - I'm still not sure *what* the heck that was about, as it had around 500 questions on it and the results were all plotted on these weird scales that seemed to have no practical relevance whatsoever. The only things I remember coming out of that one were the observations that I was prone to "aloofness" and that I might display "maladaptive behavior even in mildly stressful situations", though nobody specified exactly what they were seeing as "maladaptive".
I've also known people on the autistic spectrum who have gotten marked down as "delusional" for answering questions like "Do you hear voices?" literally -- i.e., they'll say "Yes" because they're talking about being able to hear voices when people are actually nearby talking!
I'm getting the same results on this test as you are, and I have exactly the same interpretation of why I've chosen to answer both as "NO".
The difference between the two situations might also be interpreted on the basis of the difference between "giving" vs "receiving" in terms of perceived intentionality. The test designers (as well as the majority of NT subjects) probably assume that there is no intentionality connected with the act of receiving something (i.e. getting the cup which was neither wanted nor paid for), while there is inherent intentionality in giving (i.e. paying one more dollar).
On another interpretation, "receiving" can have just as much intentionality as "giving".
It's related to whether you define "receive" as a situation where the target has to accept the object as belonging to them or not.
This, then, would be a difference in semantics.
Ah, but you say, if we thought "receiving" needs as much intentionality as "giving", we would have to answer "YES" to BOTH test instances! But we replied "NO" to both.
So maybe it's the confusion of levels and types of intentionality. Most of your actions throughout the day have to be intentional on some level, because you are a goal-seeking agent. There is some sort of intention to your moving one leg in front of the other when you want to walk; there is some sort of intention to your opening the door when you want to get inside; there is some sort of intention to you taking out your wallet and giving four dollar bills to the person behind the counter. And there is the same sort of intention behind you giving ONE MORE dollar bill to the person behind the counter.
But this low-level, subordinate-goal actional intention is not present in your receiving the commemorative cup instead of the normal one. You didn't actually perform any actions for that change to happen.
But to me, this type of intention is different from the higher-level goal/intention of getting a drink, which remained the same in both situations. And it's made explicit in the text ("I don't care about [...], I just want the biggest drink you have") that no other goals have been added.
It seems like the testers thought about the low-level intentionality, while we thought about the high-level intentionality.
Hi,
I've been lurking but this post is drawing me out of that room.
I found the question very frustrating and had to define for myself two sets of intentions: the one he came to the store with, and the one he entered the purchase with, after hearing the new conditions.
My strongest feeling was that his initial intentions were important, and he never intended either of the new conditions. If I look at what he had to do to actually make the purchases, though, I find I read things even a little differently.
As much as I wouldn't want the commemerative cup, I understood that they were offering it as some sort of bonus. So when he said "I don't care about the cup" I took that to mean that he was telling her that he didn't want it, that he just wanted the smoothie in whatever had been their standard container. So when he paid her and she gave him the smoothie in the commemorative cup, I felt that this was outside of what he (or I, projecting myself into his place) had agreed to. Not necessarily something that would make me demamd my money back, but I would not say I'd intended to receive that cup.
The extra dollar, on the other hand, is something he couldn't have involved himself in unless he'd made a new decision. ("Do I want it enough to pay the extra dollar?" He'd have to have decided that he did in order to hand it over. She couldn't have peeled it out of his wallet in the way she gave him the commemerative cup. In that case then, I felt "I don't care" had to mean, "Ok, I'll pay it. I don't care enough about the extra dollar to refuse the higher price.")
So I think his intention (new, adjusted intention) upon making the actual purchase had to include paying the extra dollar, but not getting the special cup. And I don't think it had anything to do with what he wanted, but with where the store (I assume) placed value. They placed value on the cup they were giving, so they could just as well have gone out into the street and shoved them into people's (uninterested) hands, whereas they placed value on the extra dollar they were *recieving*, which they had to get willingly from the customer. Begrudgingly maybe, but willingly. He can go home and throw the cup on the ground and kick it, but he can't go back to the store and nab his dollar back.
It all comes down, for me I think, to the meaning I place in "I don't care" in each context. Sort of makes me realize (part of) why I can't get along with anyone.
Thanks for the great blog!
ps. oh wow. I just started reading the other comments: I thought the thing about "mind reading" was a joke! I thought that was something none of us were supposed to be able to do:(
This is interesting.
I understand where they're coming from, but I answered "NO" to both as well. It's that same difference in language that you pointed out, although I would have said he "chose" to pay the extra dollar instead of "was responsible".
His "Intention" was to buy a lot of drink. His intention did not change, nor did it ever have anything to do with money.
I guess for me, though, my answer is based at least partially on mind-reading. Having been dehydrated I can understand having anything but the drink itself be a secondary consideration. To the point where a dollar is just as immaterial as the plastic cup. After a while a dollar bill starts looking like a green piece of paper you can't drink. :P
I answered "yes" to both scenarios because Joe understood, at the time he paid for the smoothie and got the cup, that it was a commemorative cup and that he was paying an extra dollar. I didn't think it mattered whether it was important to him or whether he knew about it beforehand.
This is totally a language issue; it all depends on how you define intent.
"Impaired mindreading capacity" struck me as a ludicrous description, given the fact that humans are not telepathic.
abfh:
Yeah, when I thought the scenario through, saying "Yes" to both situations was the other option that made sense to me!
You wrote: "Impaired mindreading capacity" struck me as a ludicrous description, given the fact that humans are not telepathic.
Ha, yes, same here. I really think that what's going on is the same thing that goes on in human social interactions every day: which is to say, that a statistical majority of people tend to interpret things similarly to the point where they end up with the mistaken impression that they've got some special intuitive ability about other people. Only that's just an illusion created by similarity.
karolina said: It seems like the testers thought about the low-level intentionality, while we thought about the high-level intentionality.
Yep, as you've explained it, that makes sense. And I actually think both interpretations are equally valid!
natalie: Yeah, to me the "I don't care about the cup" bit, while it didn't convey "I actively reject the cup" to me, did convey a sense of Joe seeing the cup as irrelevant.
You said: My strongest feeling was that his initial intentions were important, and he never intended either of the new conditions. If I look at what he had to do to actually make the purchases, though, I find I read things even a little differently.
Same here though it took me a *lot* of reading other's comments, etc., and some of the explanations posted, to get to the "what did he actually have to do to make the purchases" level. I had no trouble seeing that he had to go through various steps and decisions to make the purchase, but my brain was pretty much locked into seeing the question of his "intentions" as being a matter of what he intended when he entered the store.
Neat post Anne and comments (everyone) too. My timing wasn't the best when I first read it, and I had to leave, so I was thinking that might effect the results of my conclusions. I ended up thinking about what sort of a strange place it must be where the test was devised. I mean, people can approach and view problems in multiple ways, and can even differ wildy the next time they look. So I'd have to agree with Anne's assessment:
"And I actually think both interpretations are equally valid!"
And finally, if you're dehydrated, what are you doing ordering sugar? That sort of indicates that the dehydration was perhaps the result of something other than exercise, like say, party time? At which point one must consider the degree of intoxication and how that might have played a role. Because there is no way an intoxicated person could turn down the commemorative cup! :P
Anderson: Yeah, I was thinking as well that he should have ordered water or (if he was really THAT dehydrated) some kind of sports drink containing electrolytes, such as Gatorade. I don't think I've ever encountered anyone in real life saying "I'm thirsty, gee, I think I'm going to get a smoothie". Especially as some smoothies are so thick you practically have to eat them with a spoon!
"It's got electrolytes!"
Know that quote?
hint:(it's what plants crave)
The difference between the two probes seems to be that, in the case of the extra dollar, Joe was forced to take up agency to allow the transaction to occur. That additional action might be perceived as the distinguishing factor that produces a "yes" response contrary to the "no" assumed when Joe seemingly passively accepts the special cup.
If you set the baseline for intention at what Joe intended upon walking into the store, the conditions later applied don't seem to matter, whatever flavor they are. So, if anything, the article seems to be an example of how the assumptions of the reader affect their judgement, because, if you set the baseline for intention at the actual point of transaction, Joe is certainly intending to both recieve the special cup and pay an extra dollar both as conditions of his primary goal of not being thirsty any more.
The article itself seems to have a crowd-pleasing objective, in which it's simply relating the most common response back to the audience in noted confident manner, "You SURELY..." It treats the subject trivially, as a snippet of information for the perusal of an audience not necessarily analyzing the question deeply. And if the audience is not really examining the question - answering offhand or not answering at all but just flipping to the back of the book for the "correct" answer - they are rewarded with a "You are Normal" judgment. Sounds pretty fluffy to me.
I initially judged "no" to both questions, but am working to understand how people could come to other conclusions. Some tendancies it could be operating on are: making a judgement based on the most immediate circumstances rather than taking the longview (his intention was the last thing in the paragraph where Joe experienced a change in course of his own actions, vs. his intention was the first thing in the paragraph where Joe initiated his actions); making a judgement based on your imagined ability to guess what Joe is thinking (mind-read, which the article suggests as being pertinent to the "ability" of a reader to answer the questions) rather than clear understanding of the definitive meanings of the words being used; whether as a reader you mentally edit out information from the probes (and the article itself) as being meaningless rather than absorb every piece as being relevant to judgement.
Bonus question: did the cashier "intend" to change Joe's intentions?
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Ann
http://externallaptop.net
I'm neither autistic not aspergoid or anything else on that spectrum. Yet, after thinking a bit, had the "autistic" answer. My reasons were mainly a distinction between primary goal and secondary manner of achieving goal, as well as recalling something my dad said years ago about his dislike of the plural "priorities", given priority means "first", and translating that to intent (which is a bad on my part, given intent and priority are two completely different words).
At a minimum, I'd like to know the criteria the studies authors used to determine whether people are normal or autistic. I'd also like to know their rational for using a goal-directed hypothetical situation for determining "mindreading" ability. The phrasing of the followup to the hypothetical also seems to be odd (debate tactics almost - no one study is likely to be the final say for what "most people do"): "You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people (Machery, 2008)."
When I read that first bit of the article, I thought 'Wow, people with impaired mindreading ability? So they think there's also lots of people out there with excellent mindreading abilities? Now THAT I want to see :D' (mindreading as in some paranormal thing).
"Personally when I saw the phrase "commemorative cup" I pictured [...]"
Heheh... I love how I work sometimes. Adventure and RPG games on the PC are a big 'special interest' of mine and when I saw that phrase I immediately thought of the monkey-head cup you have to win in Monkey Island IV in some family restaurant/fast food place thing. And I was so pleased that that was the first thing that popped into my mind! :D
Excellent, very very interesting.
You might like to read about pinker metaphors idea. There is some in my blog, by probably reading his stuff is better. You might also like
http://singyourownlullaby.blogspot.com/2009/04/music-and-language.html
I answered 'sort of' to both, because he just wanted a drink, but he knew about the dollar and commemorative cup & didn't care. But the idea of judging one scenario differently from the other, as they say NTs do? That makes no sense to me.
Another problem I have with theory of mind tests such as this are that they fail to take into account habits and reflexes.
Nearly every time I'm at a convenience store and someone asks if I want a bag I say no thanks (sometimes after a pause that makes it look like I'm thinking things over). I say this reflexively, so reflexively that sometimes even while saying it I start thinking: damnit, I didn't want to say that, I could have used a bag.
Would my intent in these situations be to not get a bag for the goods? No, what I said was just reflex and habit.
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