Bertram Malle
Professor of Psychology:
Psychology and Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
Office: 291 Hunter Lab
Phone: 401.863.6820
Bertram_Malle@brown.edu
Professor Malle’s research examines the cognitive tools that humans bring to social interaction, especially the capacity to recognize intentionality, make inferences about mental states, and explain and morally evaluate human behavior.
Biography
Bertram F. Malle was trained in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1995. Between 1994 and 2008 he was Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and served there as Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences from 2001 to 2007. Since September 2008 he is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. He received the 1995 Society of Experimental Social Psychology Dissertation Award and a National Science Foundation CAREER award 1997-2001. He is currently President-elect of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Author of over 50 articles and chapters, he has also co-edited three published volumes, Intentions and intentionality (2001, MIT Press), The evolution of language out of pre-language (2002, Benjamins), and Other minds (2005, Guilford), and he has authored the monograph How the mind explains behavior (2004, MIT Press). His current book project is entitled Social Cognitive Science.
See also: Brown University New Faculty Announcement
Interests
Professor Malle's research examines how people make sense of human behavior, manage social interaction, and how their folk theory of mind guides these processes. In one line of research he examines the cognitive processes underlying people'ssimultaneousinferences of intentionality, mental states, and personality. A second line of research focuses on the role of intentionality judgments in the context of moral and legal judgments. A third line of research examines how people explain human behavior. Using a theoretical framework that provides an alternative to traditional attribution theory,Professor Malle explores both the cognitive and social characteristics of behavior explanation, including actor-observer asymmetries, individual-group asymmetries, and impression management. Other topics of interest include the relation between theory of mind and language, the structure and function of human values, and people's conceptions of consciousness and free will. For further information, visit Professor Malle's current website.
Curriculum Vitae
Download Bertram Malle's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format