ABSTRACT
Two notions shape a broad range of psychological theories that explore the ways lay folk understand and predict social behavior. The first is the assumption that social understanding is largely concerned with the interactions of individual persons and their minds. The second, a corollary of the first, is the confidently held conviction that only individual persons (and other complex, living organisms) are genuine intentional agents. (When other entities—computers, ghosts, or typhoons—are treated as intentional agents, such treatments are analogies or metaphorical extensions of a quality that properly applies only to humans.) Both assumptions, I suggest, although self-evident to psychologists, strike other social scientists, especially those with interest in aggregate phenomena, as, at the very least, controversial.
