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Folk psychology, commonsense psychology, or naïve psychology is the ordinary, intuitive, or non-expert understanding, explanation, and rationalization of people's and mental states. In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, it can also refer to the academic study of this concept. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure, excitement, and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon. (1990). 9780262231534, A Bradford Book. ISBN 9780262231534 Folk psychology allows for an insight into social interactions and communication, thus stretching the importance of connection and how it is experienced.
Traditionally, the study of folk psychology has focused on how everyday people—those without formal training in the various academic fields of science—go about attributing mental states. This domain has primarily been centered on intentional states reflective of an individual's beliefs and desires; each described in terms of everyday language and concepts such as "beliefs", "desires", "fear", and "hope".
Belief and desire have been the main idea of folk psychology as both suggest the mental states we partake in. Belief comes from the mindset of how we take the world to be while desire comes from how we want the world to be. From both of these mindsets, our intensity of predicting others mental states can have different results.
Folk psychology is seen by many psychologists from two perspectives: the intentional stance or the regulative view. The regulative view of folk psychology insists that a person's behavior is more geared to acting towards the societal norms whereas the intentional stance makes a person behave based on the circumstances of how they are supposed to behave.
The folk concept of intentionality is used in the legal system to distinguish between intentional and unintentional behavior. When looking at an individual, there is an unconventional way of explaining behavior in law. By looking at behaviors and expressions, folk psychology is used to predict behaviors that have been acted out in the past.
The importance of this concept transcends almost all aspects of everyday life: with empirical studies in social and developmental psychology exploring perceived intentionality's role as a mediator for aggression, relationship conflict, judgements of responsibility blame or punishment.
Recent empirical literature on folk psychology has shown that people's theories regarding intentional actions involve four distinct factors: beliefs, desires, causal histories, and enabling factors. Here, beliefs and desires represent the central variables responsible for the folk theories of intention.
Desires embody outcomes that an individual seeks, including those that are impossible to achieve. The key difference between desires and intentions is that desires can be purely hypothetical, whereas intentions specify an outcome that the individual is actually trying to bring to fruition.
In terms of beliefs, there are several types that are relevant to intentions—outcome beliefs and ability beliefs. Outcome beliefs are beliefs as to whether a given action will fulfill an intention, as in "purchasing a new watch will impress my friends". Ability consists of an actor's conviction regarding their ability to perform an action, as in "I really can afford the new watch". In light of this, Heider postulated that ability beliefs could be attributed with causing individuals to form goals that would not otherwise have been entertained. (2025). 9780898592825, Psychology Press. ISBN 9780898592825
According to the regulative point of view, social roles, cultural norms, generalizations, and stereotypes are grounded on social and developmental psychology's empirical data, which is what normative structures allude to. Based on how someone displays themselves, things like how you treat babies differently from adults and boys differently from girls might foretell how people will behave or react. According to this regulative perspective, folk psychology fulfills a "curiosity state" and a satisfactory answer satisfies the needs of the inquirer.
Moral character judgements play a significant role in comprehending folk psychology from a regulative perspective. Three categories of moral character traits are assigned: virtue-labeling, narrative-based moral assessment, as well as gossiping about traits and they use different approaches to social cognition. Although character judgement is a component in folk psychology, it does not take into consideration other processes that we engage in on the daily basis.
According to the model, the overall similarity between the prototype and a given instance of a category is evaluated based on multiple dimensions (e.g., shape, size, color). A multiplicative function modeled after this phenomenon was created.
Here, represents the similarity between the prototype and the th exemplar, is the subscript for the dimensions , and is the similarity between the prototype and the th exemplar on the th dimension.
Schank & Abelson (1977) described this inclusion of typical beliefs, desires, and intentions underlying an action as akin to a "script" whereby an individual is merely following an unconscious framework that leads to the ultimate decision of whether an action will be performed. (1977). 9780470990339, L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 9780470990339 Similarly, Barsalou (1985) described the category of the mind as an "ideal" whereby if a desire, a belief, and an intention were all present, they would "rationally" lead to a given action. They coined this phenomenon the "ideal of rational action".
Although the two components are often used interchangeably in common parlance, there is an important distinction between the goals and intentions. This discrepancy lies in the fact that individuals with an intention to perform an action also foster the belief that it will be achieved, whereas the same person with a goal may not necessarily believe that the action is able to be performed in spite of having a strong desire to do so.
Predicting goals and actions, much like the Belief-Desire Model, involves moderating variables that determine whether an action will be performed. In the Goal-Intentional Action Model, the predictors of goals and actions are: the actors' beliefs about their abilities and their actual possession of preconditions required to carry out the action. Additionally, preconditions consist of the various conditions necessary in order for realization of intentions. This includes abilities and skills in addition to environmental variables that may come into play. Schank & Abelson raises the example of going to a restaurant, where the preconditions include the ability to afford the bill and get to the correct venue, in addition to the fact that the restaurant must be open for business. Traditionally, people prefer to allude to preconditions to explain actions that have a high probability of being unattainable, whereas goals tend to be described as a wide range of common actions.
For example, one model (1994). 9780471593249, Wiley. ISBN 9780471593249 describes human everyday reasoning as combinations of simple, direct rules and similarity-based processes. From the interaction of these simple mechanisms, seemingly complex patterns of reasoning emerge. The model has been used to account for a variety of reasoning data.
There is significant debate over whether folk psychology is useful for academic purposes; specifically, whether it can be relevant with regard to the scientific psychology domain. It has been argued that a mechanism used for laypeople's understanding, predicting, and explaining each other's actions is inapplicable with regards to the requirements of the scientific method. Conversely, opponents have called for patience, seeing the mechanism employed by laypeople for understanding each other's actions as important in their formation of bases for future action when encountering similar situations. Malle & Knobe hailed this systematization of people's everyday understanding of the mind as an inevitable progression towards a more comprehensive field of psychology. Medin et al. provide another advantage of conceptualizing folk psychology with their Mixture Model of Categorization: it is advantageous as it helps predict action.
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