Are People More Likely to See Actions as Intentional When They are Forced to Make Their Decisions Quickly? A Replication and Extension of Rosset (2008)

Author

Andrew Elmore, University of South AlabamaFollow

Date of Award

12-2025

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

BS

Department

Psychology

Faculty Mentor

Joshua Foster, Ph.D.

Advisor(s)

Dakota Lindsey, Ph.D., Mark Yates, Ph.D.

Abstract

Rosset (2008) reported evidence of an intentionality bias, which is a key prediction of a model of human cognition that suggests that people learn to override intentional attributions of behavior, a dual-process model of intention attribution. A model that hypothesizes that when people are deprived of the time to develop deliberate thought processes, their default explanation for actions is intentional, and that this default attribution has to be consciously overridden. Rosset’s main method of testing this was by providing test sentences to participants and placing them into two scenarios where they had different levels of time to process the sentences. Over the years, there have been two main replication attempts at Rosset’s study, with one successfully replicating and the other failing to replicate. This study sought to do its own replication to measure the validity of the Intentionality Bias. This study failed to replicate the findings of Rosset’s 2008 study.

Recommended Citation

Elmore, Andrew, "Are People More Likely to See Actions as Intentional When They are Forced to Make Their Decisions Quickly? A Replication and Extension of Rosset (2008)" (2025). Honors Theses. 127.
https://jagworks.southalabama.edu/honors_college_theses/127