Intentional Behavior

s such as that by Nelson (1980) challenge the ages Piaget presents as being too old, Piaget’s model, and the notion of intentionality as provided a useful framework and has been utilised by numerous authors to broadly explain such childhood behaviours as social exclusion (Killen & Rutland, 2011) or responses to authority (Turiel, 1966). The majority of studies however, have used Piaget’s model descriptively, or utilised intentions as to be graphically oriented or purely descriptive. However, there has been little interaction between this field intentions studies, and a complimentary study in the research of goal-directed and habitual behaviour. There are considerable reasons why the combination of intentionality and habit/goal-directed research …show more content…
In the empirical realm, intentionality has often used to operationalise blameworthiness (a critical component of moral judgments) in how adults evaluate moral situations (Knobe, 2005). The reason intentionality maps onto this habitual/goal-directed framework is that habitual behaviour takes on an element of automaticity, such that behaviours that have are performed habitually require less cognitive control, less intention and usually individuals are not focussed on a goal. This has been demonstrated in a study by Aarts et al. there is a continuous flow between goal-directed behaviour and habitual behaviour, where habits an automatized form of goal-directed behaviour, where something that was once goal directed becomes habitual. Crucially, the basis of this continuum dictates that even in the absence of actual rewards, adults intuitively go to the action that they’ve repeated before (despite a lack of intention or explicit need or motivation)(Aarts & Dijksterhuis, …show more content…
Particularly in children with a still developing ToM, but even in adult comprehension of the world, they need to interpret the beliefs and desires of other backward from the visible behaviours. Testing to see at what age children can determine the difference between habitual behaviours and goal-directed (non-habitual behaviours) – testing with a change judgement condition; in acknowledging that habits lead to repeating the same option (even in the face of different conditions.) (Baker, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2009) Furthermore, children are known pattern seekers, so the extent to which they utilise given information and the richness of their inverse planning will be