Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The folk theory of behavior is a conceptual framework that guides all of people's dealings with behavior, including attention, explanation, and control. Philosophy of action and developmental research into children's "theory of mind" have relied heavily on plausible but speculative assumptions about this folk theory. The present paper describes empirical research on three key elements of the theory, as found in the adult social perceiver: (a) how people conceptuaUze intentionality and differentiate intentional from unintentional behavior; (b) which types of behavior (intentional vs. unintentional, observable vs. unobservable) they attend to and choose to explain; and (c) how they explain these behaviors.