Professor Malle's research examines the cognitive tools that humans bring to social interaction (often called "social cognition"), especially the capacity to recognize intentional actions, make inferences about other people's mental states, and explain people's behavior. A strong focus is also on how those cognitive tools figure in moral judgments, emotions, and behaviors, such blame, praise, and guilt. Increasingly, he applies theories and experimental methods to the questions of human-robot interaction and the appropriate design of robots that are adapted to human psychology.

I consider myself a social cognitive scientist— — an identity that has been shaped by all three traditional aspects of my academic career. As a researcher, my interests have revolved around the fundamental cognitive tools that allow humans to navigate the social world, a theme that compellingly merges the cognitive with the social. As a teacher I have had the opportunity to teach courses at that same intersection of fields, such as Social Psychology and Cognitive Science. Finally, my previous administrative activity has focused on the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon, an interdisciplinary forum for researchers who share an interest in exploring the mind within its social context. I am currently president-elect of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology, which has a long tradition of studying the mind from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Social cognitive science is the most suitable category to subsume all of these activities, and it expresses my strong commitment to study the human mind as both a cognitive and a social phenomenon. Below I describe briefly my three central research topics: Social cognition of mental states; intentionality and moral judgment; and explanations of behavior.

Social Cognition of Mental States

In making sense of human behavior, people connect the observed with the unobserved—they find meaning in behavior by inferring mental states. This ability is essential for succeeding in the social world: Without mental state inferences, observed behaviors turn blurry and indistinct, future behaviors are difficult to predict, and communicating with others becomes utterly perplexing.

My research on people' capacity to infer mental states pursues two paths. One examines the conceptual framework that underlies this capacity (people's "theory of mind"), and I have written about its evolutionary, developmental, linguistic, and cultural dimensions (Malle, 2002a, 2002c, 2004, 2005a, 2008b). Many psychological processes rely on this conceptual framework (Malle & Hodges, 2005), and in my second path I examine the perhaps most central of these processes: people's inferences of others' mental states (Malle & Pearce, 2001; Malle, 2005e; Malle & Holbrook, 2012). Each time people encounter a behavior, they make many inferences simultaneously— — e.g., about goals, beliefs, emotions— — and the question arises both how these inferences relate to each other and how they relate to other judgments, such as about age, gender, and personality. In a series of experiments funded by the National Science Foundation, Jess Holbrook and I tested a possible hierarchy among these inferences. Our studies suggest such a hierarchy ranging from the simplest judgments of a behavior's intentionality and the actor's goal to more complex and difficult judgments about the actor's thoughts and personality characteristics (Malle & Holbrook, 2012).

In ongoing work, Xuan Zhao and I explore whether visual perspective taking (the inference of another person's visual point of view and experience) is a social-cognitive process so basic that it occurs automatically in the presence of another agent.  

Intentionality, Moral Judgment, and Free Will 

My earlier work on intentionality (Malle & Knobe, 1997, 2001; Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001) examined the folk concept of intentionality that people bring to social cognition—the specific conditions that have to be met in order for a behavior to be considered intentional. In an extension into the legal realm, my former Ph.D. student Sarah Nelson and I compared people's folk concept of intentionality to the legal definitions of the terms intent and intentionality and found several contradictions between the two, which opens significant room for misperceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed judgments in legal proceedings (Malle & Nelson, 2003). Ongoing studies in my lab examine in more detail how people make judgments of intentionality about legal cases, how the results of their reasoning compare to those of the legal system, and how the two may be reconciled.

A second line of research examines empirically how intentionality judgments influence blame and how, conversely, blame might influence intentionality judgments (Malle, 2006c; Guglielmo & Malle, 2010a, 2010b). Steve Guglielmo and I have been examining to what extent people's moral evaluations of a behavior cloud their judgments of intentionality about that behavior. Such a process would present a serious challenge to the legal system if judgments of intentionality, which are normally used to ground and justify judgments of guilt and punishment, are already guided by people's intuitions about guilt and punishment. Our results suggest that previous claims of such a biasing effect (Knobe, 2003) do not hold true once the cases and questions are presented in a clear, unambiguous way — —taking into account the way people think about intentionality.

In recent work we have developed a theory of blame that fully integrates basic cognitive processes of causal, counterfactual, intentional, and mental inference (Malle, Guglielmo, & Monroe, 2012, 2014); John Voiklis, Corey Cusimano, and I are currently examining the linguistic foundations for moral criticism more generally; and Mathias Scheutz (Tufts University) and I have begun to develop a framework of possible moral competence in social robots, supported by a grant from the Office of Naval Research.  

A third line of work relates judgments of intentionality to judgments of free will and their role in moral judgments.  Though people are accused of holding a variety of metaphysical assumptions about free will (e.g., that it requires a soul, indeterminism, or an uncaused cause), it turns out that their main assumption is that humans can make choices, act intentionally in light of those choices, and are "free" to do so to the extent that nobody else if forcing them (Monroe & Malle, 2012, 2014).  And not only are people's ascriptions of free will unrelated to ascriptions of having a "soul" and to being a special cause in the universe, but ascriptions of free will themselves play no unique role in moral judgments (Monroe, Dillon, & Malle, 2014).  Instead, it is again the framework of choice, intentionality (under minimal constraints) that is critical to ascribing blame to other agents.

Explanations of Behavior 

Few theories in social psychology have received as much attention as attribution theory. The theory's assumption that humans actively interpret and explain behavioral and social events has led to many insights in the domains of social influence, self-regulation, relationships, and health. However, after nearly 40 years of research, the dominant version of attribution theory (Kelley, 1967) —characterizing explanations as referring to either "person causes" or "situation causes"— remains highly underspecified, has surprisingly little empirical support, and does not provide a comprehensive account of what people actually do when they explain behavior.

By studying naturally occurring explanations — —that is, by letting people use their own words rather than forcing pre-defined rating scales on them — —we have developed a folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanations that specifies people's conceptual assumptions underlying those explanations and generates novel predictions about various explanatory phenomena (Malle, 1999, 2001b, 2004, 2007c, 2011; Malle et al., 2000; O'Laughlin & Malle, 2002). According to this theory, people's explanations of behavior cannot be properly understood when explanations are categorized as "person" or "situation" causes. Rather, behavior explanations must be divided into multiple distinct modes (such as causes, reasons, and causal histories) and, within these modes, into specific types (such as belief vs. desire reasons). These are the distinctions that matter when people construct and perceive explanations.

To illustrate, in a meta-analysis of the well-known actor-observer asymmetry in attribution (Jones & Nisbett, 1972), the effect size across 173 published studies was zero (Malle, 2006). Thus, when explanations are couched in terms of traditional attribution theory (referring to either person or situation causes), no difference can be detected between people's explanations, as actors, of their own behavior and, as observers, of other people's behavior. By contrast, when couched in terms of the folk-conceptual theory, strong and reliable differences emerge (Malle, Knobe, & Nelson, 2007). The fact that these classifications have predictive power— — not only for actor-observer asymmetries but also for group-individual comparisons (O'Laughlin & Malle, 2002) and impression management (Malle et al., 2000) —suggests that the folk-conceptual theory of explanation captures the breakpoints, or joints, in the human endeavor of explaining behavior.

In ongoing work, Joanna Korman and I have demonstrated that people strongly prefer to use reason explanations even for utterly puzzling actions and that belief reasons, in particular, have the power to reaffirm rationality in agent who performed a puzzling behavior.   

References

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192-240). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation. Philosophical Psychology, 16, 309-324.

Jones, E. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (1972). The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In E. E. Jones, D. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior (pp. 79-94). Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.

Note: All cited references to my own publications can be found in my Curriculum Vitae.

Army Resarch Laboratory, Appropriate calibrations of trust for supporting soldier-robot teaming (co-PI). Subaward T2C2S3D to General Dynamics Land Systems grant PO40282276, 2017-2018, $50,000

NSF Partnership for Innovation/Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) Award, Next generation robotic intelligence that provides psycho-social support for older adults (PI), IIP-1717701 $999,803, 2017-2020.

Rhode Island Commerce Corporation, partnership award with Sproutel, Inc., Evaluating psychosocial support provided by Jerry the Bear for Type 1 diabetes (Project leader Malle), $50,000, May 2017- April 2018.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Foundations of Human–Machine Collaboration: Networks of Social and Moral Norms in Human and Artificial Agents (PI), $413,092, April 2016 – January 2017.  (Managed as AFOSR FA9550-16-1-0045).

Office of Naval Research, MURI: Moral competence in computational architectures for robots: Foundations, implementations, and demonstrations (co-PI with M. Scheutz and S. Bringsjord), 2014-2017.

Office of Naval Research, The role of affective phenomena in moral judgment (PI), 2013-2016.

John Templeton Foundation/FSU Research Foundation: Developing a model of the folk concept of free will and its impact on moral judgment (PI), 2011-2013.

National Science Foundation: Is there a hierarchy of social inference? Intentionality, mind, and morality (PI), 2008-2011.

Army/Department of Defense STTR Subcontract: Underlying cognitive processes of leadership behavior and development, 2002-2003.

National Science Foundation CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development): The Folk theory of behavior: Implications for social perception and Interaction (PI), 1997-2001.

National Science Foundation Instrumentation Grant (with co-PI John Orbell): Wireless Laboratory for Interpersonal Cognition, 1997.

Selected Publications

Malle, B. F., Voiklis, J., & Kim, B. (in press). Understanding contempt against the background of blame. In M. Mason (Ed.), The Moral Psychology of Contempt (pp. 79-105). Rowman & Littlefield. 

Ullman, D., & Malle, B. F. (2018). What does it mean to trust a robot? Steps toward a multidimensional measure of trust. Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI ’18 (pp. 263–264). New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/3173386.3176991

Cusimano, C., Thapa Magar, S., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Judgment before emotion: People access moral evaluations faster than affective states. In G. Gunzelmann, A., Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. J. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1848-1853). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Guglielmo, S., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Information-acquisition processes in moral judgments of blame. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,43,957–971. doi:10.1177/0146167217702375

Malle, B. F., Scheutz, M., & Austerweil, J. L. (2017). Networks of social and moral norms in human and robot agents. In M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira, J. Silva Sequeira, M. O. Tokhi, E. Kadar, & G. S. Virk (Eds.), A World with Robots: International Conference on Robot Ethics: ICRE 2015(pp. 3–18). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Monroe, A. E., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Two paths to blame: Intentionality directs moral information processing along two distinct tracks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 123-133. doi:10.1037/xge0000234

Sarathy, V., Scheutz, M., Kenett, Y., Allaham, M. M., Austerweil, J. L., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Mental representations and computational modeling of context-specific human norm systems. In G. Gunzelmann, A., Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. J. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1035-1040). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.  

Scheutz, M., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Moral robots.  In L. S. M. Johnson and K. S. Rommelfanger (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics(pp. 363-372). New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

Voiklis, J., & Malle, B. F. (2017).  Moral cognition and its basis in social cognition and social regulation.  In K. Gray and J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of Moral Psychology(pp. 108-120). New York, NY: Guilford. 

Korman, J., & Malle, B. F. (2016). Grasping for traits or reasons? How people grapple with puzzling social behaviors.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42, 1451-1465. doi:10.1177/0146167216663704

Ülkümen, G., Fox, C. R., & Malle, B. F. (2016). Two dimensions of subjective uncertainty: Clues from natural language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 1280–1297. doi:10.1037/xge0000202
Zhao, X., Cusimano, C., & Malle, B. F. (2016). Do people spontaneously take a robot’s visual perspective?  In HRI ’16: Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Christchurch, New Zealand (pp. 335-342).  Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press. doi:10.1145/2701973.2702044

Korman, J., Voiklis, J., and Malle, B. F. (2015).  The social life of cognition. Cognition,135, 30–35. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.005

Malle, B. F., Scheutz, M., Arnold, T., Voiklis, J., & Cusimano, C. (2015). Sacrifice one for the good of many? People apply different moral norms to human and robot agents. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’15), Portland, OR, USA(pp. 117–124). New York, NY: ACM.doi:10.1145/2696454.2696458

Malle, B. F., Guglielmo, S., & Monroe, A. E. (2014).  A theory of blame.  Psychological Inquiry, 25, 147-186.

Monroe, A. M., Dillon, K. D., & Malle, B. F. (2014).  Bringing free will down to earth:  People’s psychological concept of free will and its role in moral judgment.  Consciousness and Cognition, 27, 100-108. 

Roskies, A. L., & Malle, B. F. (2013). A Strawsonian look at desert. Philosophical Explorations, 16, 133-152.

Monroe, A. E. , Guglielmo, S., & Malle, B. F. (2012). Morality goes beyond mind perception. Psychological Inquiry, 23, 179–184.

Markowitz, E. M., & Malle, B. F. (2012). Did you just see that? Making sense of environmentally relevant behavior. Ecopsychology, 4, 37-50.

Malle, B. F., & Holbrook, J. (2012). Is there a hierarchy of social inferences? The likelihood and speed of inferring intentionality, mind, and personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 661–684.

Malle, B. F., Guglielmo, S., & Monroe, A. E. (2012). Moral, cognitive, and social: The nature of blame. In J. Forgas, K. Fiedler, and C. Sedikides (Eds.), Social thinking and interpersonal behavior (pp. 313-331). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Malle, B. F., & Guglielmo, S. (2011). Are intentionality judgments fundamentally moral? In C. Mackenzie and R. Langdon (Eds.), Emotion, imagination, and moral reasoning (Macquarie monographs in cognitive science) (pp. 275-293). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Malle, B. F. (2011b). Time to give up the dogmas of attribution: An alternative theory of behavior explanation. In J. M. Olson and M. P. Zanna, Advances of Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 44, pp. 297-352). Burlington: Academic Press.

Malle, B. F. (2011a). Attribution theories: How people make sense of behavior. In Chadee, D. (Ed.), Theories in social psychology (pp. 72-95). Wiley-Blackwell.

Malle, B. F. (2010). The social and moral cognition of group agents. Journal of Law and Policy, 20, 95-136.

Guglielmo, S., & Malle, B. F. (2010b). Enough skill to kill: Intentionality judgments and the moral valence of action. Cognition, 117, 139-150.

Guglielmo, S., & Malle, B. F. (2010a). Can unintended side--effects be intentional? Resolving a controversy over intentionality and morality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1635-1647.

Begeer, S., Malle, B. F., Nieuwland, M., & Keysar, B. (2010). Using theory of mind to represent and take part in social interactions: Comparing individuals with high-functioning autism and typically developing controls. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7, 104-122.

Monroe, A. E., & Malle, B. F. (2010). From uncaused will to conscious choice: The need to study, not speculate about, people's folk concept of free will. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1, 211-224.

Malle, B. F., & Holbrook, J. S. (2009). Theory of mind and consciousness. In A. Cleeremans, P. Wilken, and T. Bayne, Oxford Companion to Consciousness (pp. 630-632). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Guglielmo, S., Monroe, A. E., & Malle, B. F. (2009). At the heart of morality lies folk psychology. Inquiry, 52, 449-466.

Dieckmann, N. F., Malle, B. F., & Bodner, T. E. (2009). An empirical assessment of meta-analytic practice. Review of General Psychology, 13, 101-115.

Malle, B. F. (2008b). The fundamental tools, and possibly universals, of social cognition. In R. Sorrentino and S. Yamaguchi (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition across cultures (pp. 267-296). New York: Elsevier/Academic Press.

Malle, B. F. (2008a). Fritz Heider's legacy: Celebrated insights, many of them misunderstood. Social Psychology, 39, 163–173.

Malle, B. F., Knobe, J., & Nelson, S. (2007). Actor-observer asymmetries in behavior explanations: New answers to an old question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 491–514.

Malle, B. F. (2007). Attributions as behavior explanations: Toward a new theory. In D. Chadee and J. Hunter (Eds.), Current themes and perspectives in social psychology (pp. 3-26). St. Augustine, Trinidad: SOCS, The University of the West Indies.

Malle, B. F. (2006a). Intentionality, morality, and their relationship in human judgment. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 87-112.

Malle, B. F. (2006b). Of windmills and strawmen: Folk assumptions of mind and action. In S. Pockett, W. P. Banks, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Does consciousness cause behavior? An investigation of the nature of volition (pp. 207-231). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Malle, B. F. (2006c). The actor-observer asymmetry in causal attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 895-919. 

Malle, B. F., Tate, C. (2006). Explaining the past, predicting the future. In L. J. Sanna & E. Chang (Eds.), Judgments over time: The interplay of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (pp. 182-209). New York: Oxford University Press.

Malle, B. F., & Hodges, S. D. (Eds.). (2005). Other minds: How humans bridge the divide between self and other. New York: Guilford Press.

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 (pp. 225-255). New York: Oxford University Press.

Bruininks, P., & Malle, B. F. (2005). Positive affect toward the future: Distinguishing hope from optimism and related affective states. Motivation and Emotion, 29, 327-355.

Malle, B. F. (2004). How the mind explains behavior: Folk explanations, meaning, and social interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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. (2002). Verbs of interpersonal causality and the folk theory of mind and behavior. In M. Shibatani (Ed.), The grammar of causation and interpersonal manipulation (pp. 57-83). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Givón, T., & Malle, B. F. (Eds.). (2002). The evolution of language out of pre-language. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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.

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.

Malle, B. F., Moses, L. J., & Baldwin, D. A. (Eds.). (2001). Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of social cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Paperback 2003)

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. (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. (1997b). Which behaviors do people explain? A basic actor-observer asymmetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 288-304.

Malle, B. F., & Horowitz, L. M. (1995). The puzzle of negative self-views: An explanation using the schema concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 470-484.

Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable relating to social roles and intergroup relations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741-763.

Horowitz, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1993). Fuzzy concepts in psychotherapy research. Psychotherapy Research, 3, 131-148.

Fellow (2013-), Association of Psychological Science (APS)
President, Society of Philosophy and Psychology, 2009-2010
Posner/Boies Fellowship 2004, University of Oregon
NSF CAREER Award (1997-2001)
Outstanding Dissertation Award 1995, Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP)

Best paper award in Enabling Knowledge category, International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’15) 
Best publication award 2016, Decision Analysis Society for co-authored paper article with Ülkümen & Fox. 
 

Association for Computing and Machinery, ACM (Member)

Association of Psychological Science, APS (Fellow)

Cognitive Science Society (Member)

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE (Member), 
TechEthics™ Community (Member)

International Association for Computation and Philosophy, IACAP (Life-time member)

Society for Personality and Social Psychology, SPSP

Society of Experimental Social Psychology, SESP (Fellow)

Society of Philosophy and Psychology, SPP (Past president, life-time member)

Psi Chi National Honors Society (Member)

Psychonomic Society (Member)

Society for Personality and Social Psychology, SPSP (Member)

Society of Experimental Social Psychology, SESP (Fellow)

Society of Philosophy and Psychology, SPP (Life-time member)

Courses taught at Brown since 2009:

Multivariate Statistics
Social Psychology
Social Cognitive Science
Graduate Proseminar

Courses taught at the University of Oregon between 1995 and 2008:

Cognitive Science
Intentionality
Judgment and Decision Making
Moral Sentiments
Multivariate Statistics
Other Minds
Psychology and the Social World
Self and Others
Social Cognitive Science
Social Psychology