Intention Detection: An Essay on Our Flawed Superpower

Why our brains sometimes see intention where there is none

"Driving at night" by Alan Cleaver is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Imagine you are driving along the motorway at night. You have your music on a little bit too loud and you are enjoying a flow state. Suddenly a car changes into your lane right in front of you. What is your first reaction? It will almost certainly involve swearing and anger. You will feel deeply that the other driver did it deliberately.

Now imagine you get further down the motorway. You are feeling a little tired by now. You change lanes, but suddenly a car right behind you is flashing its lights. Whoops! Where did that come from?

A little reflection will show there is a disconnect between the two scenarios. When someone cuts you up on the motorway, your primal instincts assume it was deliberate. But when you accidentally cut someone else up, you know in your heart it was just a mistake. Isn’t it probably a mistake when someone else cuts you up too?

In 2015, psychologist Rob Brotherton published a fine book called Suspicious Minds: Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories (see link below). He says that we all have a superpower - reading other people’s minds. Humans have “an innate, unstoppable compulsion to attempt to deduce what everyone else is thinking.” This is called the theory of mind by psychologists. Children develop it around the age of four or five.

However, Brotherton says that our intuition can mislead us, as in the example above. He writes that “our intention detector is constantly on the lookout for signs of intent in the world around us… [and it] doesn’t have much self-restraint. It can get carried away, conjuring up personalities and motives, heroes and villains… In fact our intention detector seems to have a `shoot first, ask questions later`policy. It assumes everything that happens in the world happened because someone intended it to.”

The connection between what psychologists call intentionality bias and the conspiracy mindset should be obvious. Conspiracy theorists believe that everything happens for a reason and that amateur researchers can work out the answers by moving backwards from an event to the alleged intention behind it.

COVID-19 provides a useful case study. It is genuinely difficult to say whether the virus was due to a mutation jumping from one species of mammals to another or a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Despite the lack of convincing evidence on one side or the other, conspiracy theorists will always bet on the second. The reason? It contains much more intentionality.

Meanwhile, conspiracy entrepreneurs will try to make a buck by going with the grain of our innate biases. Authoritarian governments do the same, with the idea of weakening democratic institutions in the West. Sadly, fact-checkers, on the other hand, can easily generate cognitive dissonance in conspiracy theorists by being negative about their core beliefs.

The Sharpen Your Axe project is meant to help all of us develop a more sophisticated methodology. We saw recently that we cannot understand strategy without thinking about friction, which can lead to unintended consequences. We have also seen how our elites are divided and our institutions are based on contradictions that can never be fully overcome.

All this is grounded in suspending judgement and trying to move our beliefs up and down an imaginary sliding scale. Analysts who use open source intelligence (OSINT) act as a model. This method is meant to gives us a breathing space away from the sense of utter certainty we often feel when our emotions are strongly engaged, like when a random driver cuts into our lane directly in front of us. Our intentionality bias never goes away, but we can overcome it with a little work and awareness.

Once you are aware of intentionality bias, you will see it everywhere, from people talking about their dogs as if they were humans to creationists. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!

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