Liane Young
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Liane Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There is this terrible tension between the fact that nobody meant any harm, nobody meant to kill anyone, and the fact that this nine-year-old boy died. And to take it a step further, you could think of a case in which he hadn't run a stop sign. Maybe he was just driving and the child came out of nowhere. I think we would still have the intuition that
If you caused that event to happen, if you caused that bad outcome, then there is a way in which you are causally responsible for something very bad that you didn't know that you would be doing and maybe could not have prevented. And so it's really tricky to figure out how to handle that kind of case, as you point out.
I think different people have different responses to what happened and what should be done and how to prevent that from happening again.
And often in these cases, we downplay intent information. It doesn't matter that you didn't know. The fact that you did it is bad enough. And so that happens for, again, as I mentioned, violations related to food and sex. And those are cases in which once you are sort of defiled, there's very little that you can do to get clean again.
And there's very little that you could say to sort of justify or mitigate the behavior, including that you didn't know or that it wasn't done on purpose.
Yeah, exactly. So whether we interpret an event as just a natural disaster or a technical malfunction or as a coordinated planned attack can really affect the way that we respond to those events. And so when we hear about something like that, I think... First, we ask ourselves or read the news to find out what happened. And then we want to know why and who, if relevant.
And so we ask those kinds of questions in that order. And as you say, our answers to those questions really help shape our understanding of an event as either misfortune or We are trying to figure out who did it and why and what we can do to prevent it from happening in the future.
Absolutely. I think our ability to read intentions tells us how to evaluate the events around us, how to understand them, how to predict what's going to happen in the future and how to interact with people in the present. And so all of that depends on our ability to figure out intentions and distinguish intentional events from accidental events. This happens in a lot of news events that we read.
When we read about a building collapsing, we think, you know, what happened and how can we prevent that from happening in the future? And again, our answers to those questions depend on whether that happened on purpose, whether someone caused it or whether it was an earthquake. for instance. And so I think your question about why it is that we have this capacity is a really important one.
And I think we don't have an answer to that question yet as psychologists, in part because there's so many reasons why that capacity for theory of mind could be important. We need to think about other people's minds in order to figure out whom to learn from, who's the right expert in a particular domain.
We need to know about people's intentions to figure out who our friends are, who to avoid, whom to punish, whether to punish. And we need to read people's intentions in any ordinary interaction, like having a conversation and figuring out what to say and how to respond.
I am a fan, and it's a very funny clip because it captures this phenomenon that we study in psychology called indirect speech, which allows for a misinterpretation of intentions. Because She's inviting George up for, quote, coffee as opposed to asking him up more directly. It gives her plausible deniability.
So if he declines the invitation, she doesn't have to feel bad or offended or lose her pride. But on the other hand, it also leaves room for just misinterpretation and miscommunication, which is what happens a lot in real life.
Again, there is this question of what cues we are using to read people's intentions from their actions. And what is really tricky about this problem is that we can't see into people's heads. We can't observe their thoughts or their feelings. We can only observe what people do. And, you know, in this case, people's body movements reaching into a pocket and reaching into a glove compartment.
And so that leaves room for misinterpretation and really awful consequences.
Absolutely. And there are many cases in which we don't realize that we are misreading people's intentions. In the Seinfeld clip, George realized shortly after the fact that he missed the boat on that opportunity because he didn't catch what the woman was doing. But there are many cases in which we don't catch our mistakes and we're not able to fix them after the fact.
The pandemic is a really interesting case of intention reading and misunderstanding. So there have definitely been instances in which I've gone into a public indoor space wearing a mask. And I wonder what people think about what I'm doing. Do people think that I'm unvaccinated because I'm wearing a mask.
And then I have to sort of stop and think about, well, what do I think when I see somebody wearing a mask indoors? Do I think that they're unvaccinated or do I think that they're being extra careful? Do I think that they're immunocompromised or they have young children who are unvaccinated and so on?
And so it becomes a really interesting exercise to think about how people are reading my intentions and then how to read other people's intentions and sort of backtrack from that exercise to the other.
That's right. There are many cases where because intentions are not black and white, because we can't see them, there's no clear evidence for intentions. This is a case where politicians are able to frame or reframe their opponents' intentions however they see fit to be able to shape other people's thoughts and feelings about others. There's this sort of ambiguity in this space.
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