In daily social interactions, we need to be able to navigate efficiently through our social environment. According to Dennett (1971), explaining and predicting others’ behavior with reference to mental states (adopting the intentional stance) allows efficient social interaction. Today we also routinely interact with artificial agents: from Apple’s Siri to GPS navigation systems. In the near future, we might start casually interacting with robots. This paper addresses the question of whether adopting the intentional stance can also occur with respect to artificial agents. We propose a new tool to explore if people adopt the intentional stance toward an artificial agent (humanoid robot). The tool consists in a questionnaire that probes participants’ stance by requiring them to choose the likelihood of an explanation (mentalistic vs. mechanistic) of a behavior of a robot iCub depicted in a naturalistic scenario (a sequence of photographs). The results of the first study conducted with this questionnaire showed that although the explanations were somewhat biased toward the mechanistic stance, a substantial number of mentalistic explanations were also given. This suggests that it is possible to induce adoption of the intentional stance toward artificial agents, at least in some contexts.

Humans attend to social cues in order to understand and predict others’ behavior. Facial expressions and gaze direction provide valuable information to infer others’ mental states and intentions. The present study examined the mechanism of gaze following in the context of participants’ expectations about successive action steps of an observed actor. We embedded a gaze-cueing manipulation within an action scenario consisting of a sequence of naturalistic photographs. Gaze-induced orienting of attention (gaze following) was analyzed with respect to whether the gaze behavior of the observed actor was in line or not with the action-related expectations of participants (i.e., whether the actor gazed at an object that was congruent or incongruent with an overarching action goal). In Experiment 1, participants followed the gaze of the observed agent, though the gaze-cueing effect was larger when the actor looked at an action-congruent object relative to an incongruent object. Experiment 2 examined whether the pattern of effects observed in Experiment 1 was due to covert, rather than overt, attentional orienting, by requiring participants to maintain eye fixation throughout the sequence of critical photographs (corroborated by monitoring eye movements). The essential pattern of results of Experiment 1 was replicated, with the gaze-cueing effect being completely eliminated when the observed agent gazed at an action-incongruent object. Thus, our findings show that covert gaze following can be modulated by expectations that humans hold regarding successive steps of the action performed by an observed agent.

In our daily lives, we need to predict and understand others' behaviour in order to navigate through our social environment. Predictions concerning other humans' behaviour usually refer to their mental states, such as beliefs or intentions. Such a predictive strategy is called adoption of the intentional stance. In this paper, we review literature related to the concept of intentional stance from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, human development, culture and human-robot interaction. We propose that adopting the intentional stance might be a central factor in facilitating social attunement with artificial agents. The paper first reviews the theoretical considerations regarding the intentional stance, and examines literature related to the development of intentional stance across the life span. Subsequently, it discusses cultural norms as grounded in the intentional stance and finally, it focuses on the issue of adopting the intentional stance towards artificial agents, such as humanoid robots. At the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, the question of how (and when) we predict and explain robots' behaviour by referring to mental states is of high interest. The paper concludes with the discussion of the ethical consequences of robots towards which we adopt the intentional stance, and sketches future directions in research on this topic.

Humans interpret and predict others' behaviors by ascribing intentions or beliefs, or in other words, by adopting the intentional stance. Since artificial agents are increasingly populating our daily environments, the question arises whether (and under which conditions) humans would apply the "human model" to understand the behaviors of these new social agents. Thus, in a series of three experiments, we tested whether embedding humans in a social interaction with a humanoid robot either displaying a human-like or machine-like behavior would modulate their initial tendency to adopt the intentional stance. Results showed that indeed humans are more prone to adopt the intentional stance after having interacted with a more socially available and human-like robot, while no modulation of the adoption of the intentional stance emerged toward a mechanistic robot. We conclude that short experiences with humanoid robots presumably inducing a "like-me" impression and social bonding increase the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance.

In daily social interactions, we need to be able to navigate efficiently through our social environment. According to Dennett (1971), explaining and predicting others’ behaviour with reference to mental states (adopting the intentional stance) allows efficient social interaction. Today we also routinely interact with artificial agents: from Apple’s Siri to GPS navigation systems. In the near future, we might start casually interacting with robots. This paper addresses the question of whether adopting the intentional stance can also occur with respect to artificial agents. We propose a new tool to explore if people adopt the intentional stance towards an artificial agent (humanoid robot). The tool consists in a questionnaire that probes participants’ stance by requiring them to choose the likelihood of an explanation (mentalistic vs. mechanistic) of a behaviour of a robot iCub depicted in a naturalistic scenario (a sequence of photographs). The results of the first study conducted with this questionnaire showed that although the explanations were somewhat biased towards the mechanistic stance, a substantial number of mentalistic explanations were also given. This suggests that it is possible to induce adoption of the intentional stance towards artificial agents, at least in some contexts.