Bertram Malle
Professor of Psychology
Hmmmm. How to demonstrate the utility of “intentionality” research?
One line in Bertram Malle’s CV suggests a way. In 1987-89, while he was still finishing his master’s degrees in psychology and philosophy at the University of Graz in his native Austria, Malle served as project manager for the Graz Road Safety Board.
“It was basically applied psychology, trying to convince people to change their road behavior and improve their own safety,” he said. “In Europe, driving at high speed is expressing your own autonomy. The death rate on roads was much higher than the United States.”
The idea, Malle said, was to eliminate what drivers seemed to misperceive as “invitations to drive too fast” — like long straight-a-ways or intersections that favored through traffic without any reduction in speed. It worked. The Road Safety Board reached its goal of 10-percent annual reductions in road fatalities for several years in a row.
Malle’s major research interest still centers on social inference, but it’s far more complicated than drivers who infer a license to speed.
“I would call it more broadly ‘social judgment’ now, and in the last few years, I prefer to think of it as the capacities of the ‘social mind,’” he said. “The ability to deal with the complexity of human behavior — to make sense of others’ behavior — is one of the great achievements of the human mind. You can see someone start to cross the street and you quickly figure out what they are up to, what their intentions are.
“Some of these [inferences] we make very quickly, but others take longer,” Malle said. “We can detect goals, if we pay attention, but beliefs are much more difficult. Different things take longer to figure out — it’s like a hierarchy of social inferences.”
Malle will explore the hierarchy of social inferences in his research at Brown.
After earning his two masters degrees at Graz, Malle continued his studies at Stanford, where he received his Ph.D. in 1995. By then, he was already an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, where he advanced to full professor last year. Why did he make the transcontinental switch?
“I certainly didn’t plan to do it. There was some initiative from the search committee, and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll apply,’ but I didn’t think it would be likely,” he said. But the social inferences from his interview changed that.
“The realization of how serious the departments of psychology and cognitive and linguistic sciences were about their unification — the prospect of what this joint department could be — it was all very exciting,” Malle said. “I knew I still had a big chunk of my career ahead of me. Being able to invest that time in a growing department with a growing University infrastructure, a new building — to shape my core area of social psychology and cognitive science, linguistics and other disciplines. Brown suddenly seemed like my home. It was a strong mutual attraction.”
Malle will spend the fall semester on sabbatical mostly in Oregon and will begin teaching courses in the second semester. He is eager to begin his work at Brown and looks forward to construction of the new Mind, Brain, Behavior Building. The move, the new job, the new building — it's all of a piece, he said.
“The simplest fact of spatial proximity is the greatest predictor of who knows whom and how relationships begin. You are not going to build a relationship with people if you have no encounters with them,” Malle said. “This new building has a great design advantage. It is trying to make communal spaces and intellectual meeting places available. That’s how you create an intellectual powerhouse.”