| There often exists a disconnect between the desired and actual effects of social behavior. Owing to this fact, individuals interpret behavior in terms of a "folk model" that draws a distinction between the mental-state causes and the consequences of behavior. At the same time, folk perceivers may disagree as to which type of information (mental states or consequences) represents the proper underpinning of interpersonal and moral knowledge. I argue that a complete understanding of social perception requires recognition of individuals' intuitive distinction between, and different epistemic choices regarding, the mental-state causes and consequences of behavior.; I began by developing, in Study 1, a measure of beliefs concerning the proper grounding of social knowledge. The "Mentalism-Consequentialism" questionnaire distinguishes perceivers who believe that people should be judged according to their mental states ("Mentalists") from those who believe that people should be judged by the consequences of their behavior ("Consequentialists"). Studies 2 and 3 demonstrate that perceivers' trait concepts may be reliably distinguished into those that specify the chronic mental-state causes of behavior and those that denote chronic consequences of behavior. Despite good agreement concerning trait meanings, however, individuals were found to construe the same traits differently---with Mentalists taking traits to refer more to mental states, and less to actions, than did Consequentialists. In Study 4, trait meanings were found to modify the process of attribution: Whereas the attribution of mentalistic traits requires the prior inference of mental states, consequentialistic trait attribution requires only the analysis of behavior's effects. Study 5 suggested that Mentalists and Consequentialists mentally represent others disproportionately in terms of mental attributes and consequences, respectively. In the domain of moral judgment (Studies 6 and 7), I show that individuals (Mentalists and Consequentialists) and cultures (Americans and Chinese) weight mental state information (intent) and consequence information (harm severity) differently in assigning responsibility and recommending punishments for bad outcomes. Taken together, these findings should aid our understanding of how and when humans' basic "Theory of Mind" competencies are likely to be deployed in adult social perception, and in so doing can point the way to integrations between social and development psychology. |
