Attributing Intention
The problem of accurately defining intentions is a difficult one. For every observed act, there are a multitude of possible motivations. If a person buys someone a drink in the pub, he may be trying to curry favour, his friend may have bought him a drink earlier, or he may be doing a favour for a friend with no cash.
The work done by Jones and Davis only deals with how people make attributions to the person; they do not deal with how people make attributions about situational or external causes.
Jones and Davis make the reasonable assumption that, in order to infer that any effects of an action were intended, the perceiver must believe that (1) the actor knew the consequences of the actions (e.g., the technician who pushed that button at Chernobyl did not know the consequences of that action), (2) the actor had the ability to perform the action (could Lee Harvey Oswald really have shot John Kennedy?), and (3) the actor had the intention to perform the action.
Read more about this topic: Correspondent Inference Theory
Famous quotes containing the words attributing and/or intention:
“One will seldom go wrong in attributing extreme actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be “happy” is not included in the plan of “Creation.””
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)