Show Summary Details
- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
-
Section I Framing the Issues -
1.1 Social-Cognitive Development -
1.2 The Paradox of the Emerging Social Brain -
1.3 Core Social Cognition -
1.4 Core Cognition of Social Relations -
1.5 Infant Cartographers -
1.6 The Evolution of Concepts About Agents -
1.7 The Evolution of Human Sociocognitive Development -
1.8 Teleological Understanding of Actions -
1.9 How Universals and Individual Differences Can Inform Each Other -
1.10 The Contribution of Temperament to the Study of Social Cognition -
1.11 Emotion and Learning -
1.12 Early Childhood Is Where Many Adult Automatic Processes Are Born -
1.13 Social Evaluation -
Section II Mentalizing -
2.1 Universal Social Cognition -
2.2 Infant Foundations of Intentional Understanding -
2.3 Why Don’t Apes Understand False Beliefs? -
2.4 False-Belief Understanding and Why it Matters -
2.5 Language and Reasoning About Beliefs -
2.6 The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology -
2.7 The New Puzzle of Theory of Mind Development -
2.8 How Real Is the Imaginary? -
2.9 Social Engagement Does Not Lead to Social Cognition -
Section III Imitation, Modeling, and Learning From and About Others -
3.1 Natural Pedagogy -
3.2 A Comparison of Neonatal Imitation Abilities in Human and Macaque Infants -
3.3 Origins of Social Cognition -
3.4 Overimitation and the Development of Causal Understanding -
3.5 Social Cognition -
3.6 Early Social Deprivation and the Neurobiology of Interpreting Facial Expressions -
3.7 The Emergence of Perceptual Preferences for Social Signals of Emotion -
3.8 Some Thoughts on the Development and Neural Bases of Face Processing -
3.9 Redescribing Action -
3.10 Preschoolers Are Selective Word Learners -
3.11 Culture-Gene Coevolutionary Theory and Children’s Selective Social Learning -
3.12 How Causal Learning Helps Us Understand Other People and How Other People Help Us Learn About Causes -
3.13 How Children Learn From and About People -
3.14 Children Learn From and About Variability Between People -
Section iv Trust and Skepticism -
4.1 The Gaze of Others -
4.2 Empathy Deficits in Autism and Psychopaths -
4.3 Status Seeking -
4.4 Reputation Is Everything -
4.5 Understanding Expertise -
4.6 Respectful Deference -
4.7 Children’s Understanding of Unreliability -
4.8 Biased to Believe -
4.9 Food as a Unique Domain in Social Cognition -
Section V Us and Them -
5.1 What Is Group Psychology? -
5.2 The Conceptual Structure of Social Categories -
5.3 Essentialism -
5.4 Generic Statements, Causal Attributions, and Children’s Naive Theories -
5.5 From Categories to Exemplars (and Back Again) -
5.6 Bridging the Gap Between Preference and Evaluation During the First Few Years of Life -
5.7 On the Developmental Origins of Differential Responding to Social Category Information -
5.8 Building a Better Bridge -
5.9 Is Gender Special? -
5.10 Does Your Infant Say the Words “Girl” and “Boy”?How Gender Labels Matter in Early Gender Development -
5.11 Bringing the Cognitive and the Social Together -
5.12 The Development of Language as a Social Category -
5.13 The Study of Lay Theories -
5.14 Social Acumen -
5.15 Understanding and Reducing Social Stereotyping and Prejudice Among Children -
5.16 What Are They Thinking? -
5.17 How Do Children Learn to Actively Control Their Explicit Prejudice? -
Section vi Good and Evil -
6.1 What Primates Can Tell Us About the Surprising Nature of Human Choice -
6.2 Horrible Children -
6.3 Young Children’s Moral and Social-Conventional Understanding -
6.4 The Origin of Children’s Appreciation of Ownership Rights -
6.5 Becoming a Moral Relativist -
6.6 The Origins of the Prosocial Ape -
6.7 Cooperation, Behavioral Diversity, and Inequity Responses -
6.8 Morality, Intentionality, and Exclusion -
6.9 Converging Developments in Prosocial Behavior and Self-Other Understanding in the Second Year of Life -
6.10 Disposition Attribution in Infancy -
6.11 What Do Children and Chimpanzees Reveal About Human Altruism? - Index
Teleological Understanding of Actions
Teleological Understanding of Actions
- Chapter:
- (p.38) 1.8 Teleological Understanding of Actions
- Source:
- Navigating the Social World
- Author(s):
Gergely Csibra
György Gergely
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199890712.003.0008
An observed behavior is interpreted as an action directed to a particular end state if it is judged to be the most efficient means available to the agent for achieving this goal in the given environment. When such an interpretation is established, it creates a teleological representation of the action, which is held together by the principle of efficiency. The paradigmatic situation in which the functioning of teleological interpretation can be tested is when one observes a behavior (e.g., an agent jumps into the air while moving in a certain direction) leading to an end state (e.g., the agent stops next to another object). If, and only if, the behavior (jumping) is justified by environmental factors (by the presence of a barrier over which the jumping occurs) will this behavior be interpreted as a means action to achieve the end state as the goal of the action (to get in contact with the other object). Researchers have published extensive evidence that infants from at least six months of age form this kind of teleological representations of actions. This chapter attempts to clarify commonly raised issues about this theory in a question-and-answer format.
Keywords: observed behavior, agent, goal-directed actions, teleological representation, efficiency, infants
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
-
Section I Framing the Issues -
1.1 Social-Cognitive Development -
1.2 The Paradox of the Emerging Social Brain -
1.3 Core Social Cognition -
1.4 Core Cognition of Social Relations -
1.5 Infant Cartographers -
1.6 The Evolution of Concepts About Agents -
1.7 The Evolution of Human Sociocognitive Development -
1.8 Teleological Understanding of Actions -
1.9 How Universals and Individual Differences Can Inform Each Other -
1.10 The Contribution of Temperament to the Study of Social Cognition -
1.11 Emotion and Learning -
1.12 Early Childhood Is Where Many Adult Automatic Processes Are Born -
1.13 Social Evaluation -
Section II Mentalizing -
2.1 Universal Social Cognition -
2.2 Infant Foundations of Intentional Understanding -
2.3 Why Don’t Apes Understand False Beliefs? -
2.4 False-Belief Understanding and Why it Matters -
2.5 Language and Reasoning About Beliefs -
2.6 The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology -
2.7 The New Puzzle of Theory of Mind Development -
2.8 How Real Is the Imaginary? -
2.9 Social Engagement Does Not Lead to Social Cognition -
Section III Imitation, Modeling, and Learning From and About Others -
3.1 Natural Pedagogy -
3.2 A Comparison of Neonatal Imitation Abilities in Human and Macaque Infants -
3.3 Origins of Social Cognition -
3.4 Overimitation and the Development of Causal Understanding -
3.5 Social Cognition -
3.6 Early Social Deprivation and the Neurobiology of Interpreting Facial Expressions -
3.7 The Emergence of Perceptual Preferences for Social Signals of Emotion -
3.8 Some Thoughts on the Development and Neural Bases of Face Processing -
3.9 Redescribing Action -
3.10 Preschoolers Are Selective Word Learners -
3.11 Culture-Gene Coevolutionary Theory and Children’s Selective Social Learning -
3.12 How Causal Learning Helps Us Understand Other People and How Other People Help Us Learn About Causes -
3.13 How Children Learn From and About People -
3.14 Children Learn From and About Variability Between People -
Section iv Trust and Skepticism -
4.1 The Gaze of Others -
4.2 Empathy Deficits in Autism and Psychopaths -
4.3 Status Seeking -
4.4 Reputation Is Everything -
4.5 Understanding Expertise -
4.6 Respectful Deference -
4.7 Children’s Understanding of Unreliability -
4.8 Biased to Believe -
4.9 Food as a Unique Domain in Social Cognition -
Section V Us and Them -
5.1 What Is Group Psychology? -
5.2 The Conceptual Structure of Social Categories -
5.3 Essentialism -
5.4 Generic Statements, Causal Attributions, and Children’s Naive Theories -
5.5 From Categories to Exemplars (and Back Again) -
5.6 Bridging the Gap Between Preference and Evaluation During the First Few Years of Life -
5.7 On the Developmental Origins of Differential Responding to Social Category Information -
5.8 Building a Better Bridge -
5.9 Is Gender Special? -
5.10 Does Your Infant Say the Words “Girl” and “Boy”?How Gender Labels Matter in Early Gender Development -
5.11 Bringing the Cognitive and the Social Together -
5.12 The Development of Language as a Social Category -
5.13 The Study of Lay Theories -
5.14 Social Acumen -
5.15 Understanding and Reducing Social Stereotyping and Prejudice Among Children -
5.16 What Are They Thinking? -
5.17 How Do Children Learn to Actively Control Their Explicit Prejudice? -
Section vi Good and Evil -
6.1 What Primates Can Tell Us About the Surprising Nature of Human Choice -
6.2 Horrible Children -
6.3 Young Children’s Moral and Social-Conventional Understanding -
6.4 The Origin of Children’s Appreciation of Ownership Rights -
6.5 Becoming a Moral Relativist -
6.6 The Origins of the Prosocial Ape -
6.7 Cooperation, Behavioral Diversity, and Inequity Responses -
6.8 Morality, Intentionality, and Exclusion -
6.9 Converging Developments in Prosocial Behavior and Self-Other Understanding in the Second Year of Life -
6.10 Disposition Attribution in Infancy -
6.11 What Do Children and Chimpanzees Reveal About Human Altruism? - Index
