Keith E. Davis’s research while affiliated with University of Colorado Boulder and other places

This chapter describes the naive explanation of human actions, theory of correspondent inferences, personal involvement and correspondence, and the recent research concerning phenomenal causality and the attribution of intentions. The cognitive task of establishing sufficient reason for an action involves processing the available information about, or making assumptions about, the links between stable individual dispositions and observed action. The dispositional attributes are inferred from the effects of action, but not every effect is equally salient in the inference process. The perceiver's fundamental task is to interpret or infer the causal antecedents of action. When a person's actions have certain consequences, it is important for the perceiver to determine whether the person was capable of producing these consequences in response to his intentions. Where an actor fails to produce certain effects that might have been anticipated by the perceiver, there may be ambiguity as to whether the actor did not want to produce the effects, or wanted but was not able to. The attribution of intentions is that actions are informative to the extent that they have emerged out of a context of choice and reflect a selection of one among plural alternatives. However, the distinctiveness of the effects achieved and the extent to which they do not represent stereotypic cultural values, determine the likelihood that information about the actor can be extracted from an action. To say that an inference is correspondent, then, is to say that a disposition is being rather directly reflected in behavior, and that this disposition is unusual in its strength or intensity. In-role behavior is supported by too many reasons to be informative about the actor. However, out-of-role behavior is more informative because the effects of such actions are distinctive and not to be dismissed as culturally desirable.