Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper investigates how the different levels of hierarchical plans modulate judgments of intentional action. While previous research has focused on how moral valence influences intentionality judgments of side-effects (outcomes that were not a part of the agent's original plan), we focus on sub-events, which are candidate decompositions of higher-level goals that were a part of the agent's plan. We address two central questions: (1) does the impact of moral valence on intentionality judgments differ between sub-events and side-effects? and (2) does the level of abstraction at which a sub-event is defined affect judgments of its intentionality? Our results show that the effect of moral valence is largely neutralized for sub-events, which instead exhibit a decrease in perceived intentionality as they are decomposed into lower-level actions. This indicates that future models of intentional action should take into account the asymmetry in judgments between higher- and lower-level actions.