Perceived intentionality and social perspective taking: when do we give others the benefit of the doubt

Abstract

The intentions we attribute to others effect on how we perceive ambiguous actions. Think of the polarized interpretations of police conduct in the news where the same actions are witnessed by all but how those actions are perceived differs because of varying attributions of intent. The present study explored relationships between social perspective taking and attributions of intent in an online survey administered to ninety-three undergraduate students. Social perspective taking and attributions of intent were assessed in relation to an ambiguous sentence task as a measure of intentionality bias and a series of vignettes as a measure of hostile attributions of intent. It was hypothesized that intentionality bias would be associated with social perspective taking, social perspective taking would be associated with reduced hostile attribution bias, and a relationship between intentionality bias and hostile attribution bias would be mediated by social perspective taking. No relationship was found between intentionality bias and social perspective taking, but an inverse relationship was found between social perspective taking and hostile attribution bias as was found a relationship between intentionality bias and hostile attribution bias albeit not mediated by social perspective taking. These findings provide support for the assumption that intentionality bias and hostile attribution bias are related, and that social perspective taking and hostile attributions of intent are related, albeit negatively.