Revisiting the folk concept of intentionality: Replications of Malle and Knobe (1997)

Abstract

Malle and Knobe's (1997) Study 1 found that people exhibit a shared understanding of intentionality and apply it consistently in their judgments. The study found that different people tend to judge intentionality similarly, and that intentionality ratings were consistent across a set of behaviors from an actor's or an observer's perspective. Additionally, the presence or absence of a definition of intentionality as part of the study instruction did not seem to affect the intentionality judgments. We conducted two pre-registered replications of Study 1 (N = 46; N = 817). The replication results provide support for the findings of the original study. Consistent with the original study, we found high inter-rater agreement across perspective (actor vs. observer) experimental conditions; and no evidence for differences in intentionality ratings depending on whether a definition of intentionality was provided. We observed that actor perspective led to a higher average rating of intentionality than the observer perspective.