Bertram Malle

Introduction

Bertram F. Malle is an Austrian-born psychologist and professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, where he also co-directs the Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative. He works on the ordinary, unglamorous machinery of social life: how we decide whether someone did something on purpose, how we explain why they did it, and how we decide what they deserve for it. His folk-conceptual theory of intentionality, developed with the philosopher Joshua Knobe in the 1990s, argued that people's everyday concept of intentional action is richer and more structured than the philosophical concept that psychologists had borrowed — and it accidentally opened the door to one of the most discussed findings in experimental philosophy. Malle has since extended the same programme into blame, guilt and norms, and more recently into a question that would have seemed like science fiction when he started: what would a robot have to have, in order to behave morally around people?

Early Life and Education

Malle was born in Graz, Austria, and studied psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Graz, taking master's degrees in philosophy and linguistics in 1987 and in psychology in 1989. The combination matters. His later work is unusual among social psychologists for treating philosophical analysis as a tool rather than as an opponent, and for insisting that before measuring a folk concept you have to work out what the concept actually contains. He moved to the United States in 1990 for doctoral study and received his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1995, winning the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Outstanding Dissertation Award that same year.

That sequence — conceptual analysis first, measurement second — is the methodological claim his career has rested on, and it cuts against the grain of a field that tends to define its constructs operationally and let the data do the defining. Malle's position is that an operational definition of "intentional" smuggles in a theory of what intentional means; if the theory is wrong, every experiment using the measure inherits the error. His opponents reply that you can spend a very long time arguing about what the folk concept contains without ever finding out what people do with it.

Academic and Professional Career

Malle joined the faculty of the University of Oregon in 1995, the year he completed his doctorate. There he directed the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences from 2001 to 2007 and became a full professor in 2007. He moved to Brown University in 2008 and has served as chair of his department.

His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, which gave him a CAREER award in 1997, and also by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army, the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, the Templeton Foundation, and Deloitte. He was president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology in 2009, is a co-recipient of the 2019 Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and is a fellow of that society as well as of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Cognitive Science Society. His publications run to more than 180 scientific papers and several books, and he co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology (2025).

Major Contributions to Psychology

The folk concept of intentionality

The question Malle and Knobe asked in 1997 sounds pedantic and turned out not to be: when ordinary people say someone did something intentionally, what do they think they are saying? The answer they proposed was that the folk concept is not a single intuitive notion but a package with several components. A person is judged to have acted intentionally when they had a desire for an outcome, a belief that the action would produce it, an intention to act, the skill to perform the action, and awareness of what they were doing while doing it. This matters because it makes intentionality a graded and dissociable judgement rather than a verdict, and it makes possible the empirical study of which component people are actually relying on in a given case.

The Knobe effect

The collaboration produced a finding that escaped its original context. Knobe's 2003 experiments showed that when a chairman's action has a foreseen side effect, people say he brought that side effect about intentionally if the side effect is bad but not if it is good — even though his attitude and his foresight are the same in both versions. The side-effect effect, or Knobe effect, has generated a very large literature and a great deal of argument about whether moral judgement shapes what should be a non-moral concept. Malle's framework supplied the apparatus used to analyse it.

How the mind explains behavior

Malle's 2004 book How the Mind Explains Behavior argued that people explain behaviour in two fundamentally different registers. Reasons explanations cite the agent's mental states — she left because she was angry — and are used for intentional actions. Cause explanations cite factors outside the agent's reasoning, and are used for unintentional ones. The implication is that the decision about intentionality comes first and determines the shape of the explanation, which reverses the order most attribution theories had assumed.

Moral psychology: blame, guilt and norms

More recently Malle has worked on the cognitive and social structure of blame, on guilt, and on norms. His approach treats blame not as a single response but as a sequence — the detection of a norm violation, the attribution of the event to an agent, and the assignment of a response — with each stage capable of failing independently. This work connects to Jonathan Haidt and others on moral judgement while keeping Malle's characteristic focus on the concepts people actually use rather than on the situations an experimenter can construct.

Moral competence in robots

Since around 2014 Malle has argued that social robots need something he calls moral competence, and he has broken it into five components: a system of norms, a moral vocabulary, moral cognition and affect, moral decision-making and action, and moral communication. The argument is that a robot working alongside people must at minimum track and abide by norms, and that this is a much harder engineering problem than it appears because human norms have properties — they are implicit, context-sensitive, and enforced socially — that are difficult to specify formally.

Major Publications

  • Malle, B. F., Moses, L. J., & Baldwin, D. A. (Eds.). (2001). Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. MIT Press.
  • Malle, B. F., & Givón, T. (Eds.). (2002). The Evolution of Language Out of Pre-language. John Benjamins.
  • Malle, B. F. (2004). How the Mind Explains Behavior: Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction. MIT Press.
  • Malle, B. F., & Hodges, S. D. (Eds.). (2005). Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide Between Self and Others. Guilford Press.
  • Malle, B. F., & Robbins, P. (Eds.). (2025). The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Impact and Legacy

Malle's work sits at a point where three literatures meet, and its influence is easiest to see in the fields it made possible rather than in his own citation counts. The folk-conceptual analysis of intentionality is the standard reference point for anyone studying how people attribute mental states, and the Knobe effect has become a fixture of both experimental philosophy and moral psychology syllabi. His two-mode account of behaviour explanation reshaped the way attribution researchers think about the order of operations in social judgement.

The interpretation of that work, however, is contested, and the Knobe effect in particular has never settled. The original claim was that moral considerations penetrate the very concept of intentional action. Alternatives have been proposed continuously since: that the effect reflects defensive attribution, that it depends on what participants take to be at stake in the conversation, that it is driven by the perceived skill or competence of the agent, or that it is an artefact of how the question is asked. Others have argued that the data do not establish that the folk concept is normative at all, only that people's judgements are sensitive to the valence of outcomes. The effect also appears to vary across populations and languages, which complicates any claim that it reveals a universal architecture of moral cognition.

The five-component model of intentionality has its own difficulties. It is not clear that all five components are doing independent work: desire, belief and intention are closely entangled, and several studies find that people's judgements are predicted about as well by a much simpler proxy — did the agent mean to do it and did they know what they were doing. A model with five parts and no specified weights is hard to falsify, and critics have argued that its value has been organisational — it tells you what to look for — rather than predictive. Malle's response, that the components were derived from how people talk about action rather than fitted to judgements, is a reasonable one, but it does not settle whether the concept has that structure or merely supports talking about it that way.

The reasons–causes distinction has been criticised along similar lines. It is a clean distinction at the level of theory and a porous one in practice: people give causal explanations for intentional actions ("she left because he made her life impossible") and reason explanations for things they regard as unintentional, and the mapping between explanation type and intentionality judgement is strong but not the deterministic ordering the model proposes.

Two broader criticisms apply to the research programme as a whole. First, the evidence base for folk conceptual analysis rests overwhelmingly on brief written vignettes presented to undergraduate or online samples, a method whose fragility has been exposed repeatedly across social psychology. Malle has been more willing than most to supplement it with corpus analysis, observation of natural interaction, and reaction-time work, but the literature he influenced has not followed him there in equal measure. Second, the robotics programme invites a question that is partly empirical and partly not: whether building moral competence into machines is a goal to pursue, or whether, as critics of artificial moral agency argue, it is better to keep robots as transparent tools whose behaviour is attributable to the people who deploy them. That Malle's work in this area is funded substantially by military research agencies sharpens the question, because the norms a robot is built to follow will be the norms of whoever commissions it.

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Last updated: 2026-10-20

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