Bertram F. Malle
Department of Psychology
1227 University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1227
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (541) 346-0475
Fax: (541) 346-4911
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I am currently working in the following main research areas:
(1) Folk Theory of Mind and Behavior: Much of my research revolves around people's attempts to make sense of themselves and others and the tools people use to achieve this goal. One of the central tools is the folk theory of mind and behavior, a conceptual framework that helps people bring order to perceptions, interpretations, explanations, and evaluations of human behavior and experience (Malle, in press). My work focuses on the empirical study of the adult framework of mind and behavior, but it is informed by developmental work on children’s emerging framework and philosophical work on the conceptual puzzles associated with such a theory.
(2) The Concept of Intentionality: One of the key elements of people's folk theory of behavior is the concept of intentionality (Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001). In early empirical work, Joshua Knobe and I have documented that people use the concept of intentionality consistently and follow a definition that has five components (Malle & Knobe, 1997a): An action is considered intentional if the agent has (a) a desire for an outcome, (b) a belief that the action will lead to the outcome, (c) an intention to perform the action, (d) skill to perform the action, and (e) awareness while performing it. Recently we have examined in more detail the conceptual and social differences between the components of desire and intention (Malle & Knobe, 2001) and studied the relationship between intentionality judgments and moral blame, both in everyday and legal contexts (Malle & Nelson, 2003).
(3) Explanations of Behavior: Behavior explanations lie at the intersection of social perception and social behavior. They are a cognitive tool by which people make sense of themselves and others, and they are a social tool with which people manage social interaction. Over several years now, I have developed a theory of behavior explanation that provides an alternative to classic attribution theories (Malle, 1999, 2004; Malle, Knobe, O'Laughlin, Pearce, & Nelson, 2000). According to this theory, people's behavior explanations do not differ along a simple person-situation dimension; rather, they make sense of behavior by using four distinct modes of explanation, one for unintentional behavior and three for intentional behavior. Each of these modes has conceptual and linguistic features that allow us to predict such phenomena as actor-observer asymmetries (Malle, 2002), impression management (Malle et al., 2000), or differences between explanations of individuals and groups (O’Laughlin & Malle, 2002). Additional work in our lab explores the role of rationality judgments in explanations of behavior and the specific cognitive processes that underlie the construction of behavior explanations.
(4) Attention to Mind and Behavior: In social interaction, people attend to both observable and unobservable behavioral events as well as intentional and unintentional behavioral events. In previous work we showed that A handful of psychological processes predicts which of these even types people attend to and wonder about in interaction, and these processes include awareness, previous understanding, and pragmatic relevance as well as the person’s perspective (as actor or observer) (Malle & Knobe, 1997b; Pearce & Malle, 2001). More recently we have begun to investigate the social conditions under which people specifically try to infer other people’s “unobservable” (i.e., mental) events. We are examining this question in a new laboratory that allows us to measure people’s on-line mental state inferences while they are engaged in social interaction.
Additional, newer topics of research include the cognitive processes that underlie prediction, moral sentiments such as blame, shame, and outrage, and the evolutionary basis of language and theory of mind.
 Books:
 Givón, T., & Malle, B. F. (Eds.). (2002). The evolution of language out of pre-language. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Malle, B. F. (2004). How the mind explains behavior: Folk explanations, meaning, and social interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Malle, B. F., Moses, L. J., & Baldwin, D. A. (Eds.) (2001). Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of social cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Journal Articles:
- Malle, B. F. (1999). How people explain behavior: A new theoretical framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 23-48.
- Malle, B. F., & Knobe, J. (1997a). The folk concept of intentionality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 101-121.
- Malle, B. F., & Knobe, J. (1997). Which behaviors do people explain? A basic actor-observer asymmetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 288-304.
- Malle, B. F., Knobe, J., O’Laughlin, M., Pearce, G. E., & Nelson, S. E. (2000). Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations: Beyond person–situation attributions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 309-326.
- Malle, B. F., & Nelson, S. E. (2003). Judging mens rea: The tension between folk concepts and legal concepts of intentionality. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 21,563-580.
- Malle, B. F., & Pearce, G. E. (2001). Attention to behavioral events during social interaction: Two actor-observer gaps and three attempts to close them. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 278-294.
- O’Laughlin, M. J., &. Malle, B. F. (2002). How people explain actions performed by groups and individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 33-48.
Other Publications:
- Malle, B. F. (2005). Folk theory of mind: Conceptual foundations of human social cognition. In R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The new unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Malle, B. F., & Ickes, W. (2000). Fritz Heider: Philosopher and psychologist. In G. A. Kimble & M. Wertheimer (Eds.), Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology (Vol. 4, pp. 193-214). Washington, DC and Mahwah, NJ: American Psychological Association and Erlbaum.
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