The intent behind a given behavior is the source of the meaning of that behavior. Arguably, an action driven by an intent that is fair or better has the potential to contribute to the pursuit of happiness, and an action driven by an intent that is less than fair has the potential to get in the way of it.
The spectrum of intent stretches from selfish to selfless. It can be divided into the following five categories:
- Selfish
- Self-centered
- Fair and equal
- Kind and generous
- Selfless
To illustrate the meaning of each of these categories, imagine the following scenario: you and another person (who is much like you — of the same gender, about your age, and size) are lost in the desert. You are both overheated and dehydrated, staggering aimlessly and getting increasingly desperate. All of a sudden, you stumble on a jug full of safe drinking water. At that point, you must choose one of five behavioral options, each representing one of the categories on the intent continuum.
The lowest option on the quality scale is behavior driven by a selfish intent. Acting selfishly implies the actor has full awareness of the other’s need for the resource at hand, yet, in spite of this awareness, the actor actively dismisses the value of the other’s need.
In our mental experiment in the desert, you are aware of your companion’s need for water, and you know full well that it is identical to yours: If either one of you continues without water, they will perish. Nonetheless, you may make a selfish choice and opt not to share your find, ignoring your companion’s desperate pleas.
Opting for the selfish option, one dismisses the importance of the other’s need, emphasizing the importance of one’s own need — even though the needs are recognized as identical.
The next scenario illustrates the self-centered option. In this example, when you stumble on the jug of water, you become so excited with your discovery that you momentarily literally forget about your mate’s existence and thus lose sight of his/her needs. All that your mind holds at that moment is yourself — your thirst, your need for hydration, and the sudden availability of the resource that can satisfy it.
Just like in the first scenario, you start chugging the water. However, once your mate starts pleading for water, you are forced to wake up from your self-centered absorption. The pleas remind you of the existence of the other person and of his or her needs, forcing you to take their existence into consideration — which underscores the fact that the self-centered state is a transitory, “on the fence” state.
Self-centeredness is based on passively ignoring — rather than actively dismissing — the needs of the other. When the reminder arrives, in the form of pleas in our example, one is forced to “get off the fence” and choose either the lower side — selfishness, or the higher side — the fair and equal option.
Children operate exclusively out of self-centered intent. The human brain requires, more or less, twenty years to mature to the point of automatically taking the needs of others into consideration (Erikson, 1982). Children are not selfish; they are self-centered by a neurodevelopmental necessity. Self-centeredness is transitory in a psychological developmental sense. The capacity to automatically take the needs of others into consideration is a key developmental milestone. Because all adults have a history of fifteen to twenty years of self-centered behavior, all adults are capable of regressing into acting in self-centered ways with relative ease (particularly under stress). We therefore tend to perceive an adult who acts self-centeredly as immature or childish.
Back to our exploration of the categories of intent. The next level up is the fair and equal intent. In our ‘lost in the desert’ mental experiment — upon discovering the water jug, driven by a fair and equal intent, you would offer to share the water (i.e., the resource) in a way that reflects your perception of you and your companion’s relative need for it: If you realize that your needs for the water are the same, the fair and equal intent (and ultimately, conduct) would be to divide the water into two equal parts. If your needs were not equal — for example, if the other person happened to be pregnant (which means that she has a greater need for water than you, assuming you are not pregnant), the fair choice would be to distribute more than half to her, the needier party, and less than half to you.
A kind and generous intent, the next level up, would be manifested if you chose to give your companion more than half of the water — even though you recognize that your needs are equal, and make do with less than half, i.e., less than your fair share.
At the highest level of intent, your own thirst — the importance of your own need — would be negligible in comparison to the importance you give to the need of the other. Operating at that level, you would hand over the jug of water and encourage your fellow traveler to drink it all.
Normal adults, under ordinary circumstances, are generally motivated by a fair intent, i.e., typically, our “default setting” is fairness. Well-adjusted, content, healthy human adults instinctively act fairly and are made uncomfortable by considering (or witnessing) actions driven by a less-than-fair intent.
If indeed the effective pursuit of happiness is within the reach of every ordinary human (i.e., it doesn’t require any special skills, knowledge, or superpowers, as discussed in the Doing The Best I Can Do chapter in the Practice section), then this indicates that fairness is a good enough intent to support the pursuit of happiness. In other words, you don’t need to worry about acting better than fairly to pursue happiness effectively, but you can’t lose sight of what constitutes fairness.
Suffering often causes regression to a self-centered (or lower — selfish) state. Therein lies the Buddhist concept of the Cycle of Suffering: Actions driven by a less-than-fair intent typically invite problems and create complications, which contribute to the actor’s suffering (an unavoidable loop that, oddly, is rarely recognized). Consistently, actions motivated by a less-than-fair intent cannot contribute to the pursuit of happiness. Self-centered and selfish acts either make no difference or make matters worse.
The next level up on the scale is kind and generous intent. Acts of kindness and generosity are remarkably common. Circumstantial evidence associated with such acts supports the claim that a better-than-fair intent tends to support the pursuit of happiness more robustly than actions driven by mere fairness.
Selflessness, on the other hand, is rare. The most consistent and widely available exception is the parent-child relationship — ordinary parents have a strong biological pull toward selflessness.
Imagining myself lost in the desert and finding the jug of water, the only person I can say with confidence whose need for water would be more important to me than my own need is my child. (Personal side note: In case one of my children is reading this — the last statement applies equally to each of you.)
Therein lies the primary reward for the overall thankless job of parenting: The parental role offers ordinary people proof of their inherent ability to operate from the highest level — to function as selfless beings. This, in my opinion, is the main link that connects parenting with the pursuit of happiness.
To complete the discussion of intent, we need to consider one additional phenomenon — the self-sacrificing behavior. Self-sacrifice, in my view, is a “pseudo intent” and, as such, it has no place on the continuum presented above. In most cases, self-sacrificial behaviors are disingenuous, attempting to create an impression of oneself as more ‘evolved’ than one truly is. In some cases, however, self-sacrifice stems not from deception but from an excessive fear of inadvertently acting less-than-fair — a miscalibration rather than a pretense (addressed later in this section).
To illustrate this, I will return to our lost-in-the-desert mental experiment one more time: In this run, upon finding the jug of water, you hand it over to your mate and encourage him or her to drink it all. This act of self-sacrifice is fueled by a (conscious or subconscious) wish to create the impression that you are indeed selfless, which, in all likelihood, would be deceptive. The self-sacrificing person expects that their offer will be turned down. Their actual motivation is to create the image of an evolved, selfless person. If their offer is accepted, the self-sacrificing person feels resentful rather than elated, which, as most ordinary parents can attest, is the result of genuine selfless acts.
A lack of clarity about what constitutes fairness can also lead to self-sacrificing behavior. In this case, self-sacrifice is the result of one’s fear of inadvertently acting in a way that turns out less-than-fair. This fear can be addressed by overshooting the (elusive) mark of fairness; essentially, the act is designed to keep the actor on the safe side. Possessing a clear idea about what constitutes fairness enables avoiding this type of inadvertent self-sacrifice. Hence, genuine acts of generosity (or better) require clarity about fairness, and comfort with leaving it at that — mere fairness. A person who’s not comfortable with just being fair is unlikely to do any better because of the risk of inadvertent self-sacrifice.
The dynamics driving self-sacrificing behaviors are often subconscious and may be difficult to identify before the behavior is enacted. The true nature of one’s intent is easily exposed after the fact. That is so because self-sacrifice is invariably followed by frustration and resentment. In comparison, genuinely kind, generous, or selfless behaviors are invariably followed by a sense of reward and satisfaction.
Intent and Social Interactions
We are continuously exposed to the behaviors of everyone around us. Since the meaning of all deliberate actions is in the intent, our brains are continuously challenged to correctly interpret the intent behind the behaviors we notice, i.e., the brain must have a dedicated ‘intent interpreter’ function, operating subconsciously and automatically. Not surprisingly, this amazing non-stop attribution of intent is not 100% accurate; it happens with varying degrees of accuracy. Still, normal functioning of the brain’s intent interpreter supports smooth and productive social interactions: The actions of people around us make sense, and our responses, for the most part, are appropriate. When the intent interpreter malfunctions, as is the case in psychiatric disorders such as paranoid schizophrenia and autism, the results can be crippling (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Combs et al., 2007; Premack & Woodruff, 1978).
Errors in the attribution of intent happen without brain pathology, as mentioned above. Under normal conditions, these errors are infrequent and not devastating, but they can be costly. For example, imagine a stranger sitting next to you on the bus suddenly slapping you on the head. Chances are that your brain will automatically attribute a negative intent to the stranger’s act and register it as negative. Consequently, your response is likely to be of the same vein, hostile, perhaps even violent. Imagine that, following your equally negative act, the stranger who hit you points to a dangerous-looking dead insect on the floor. The sight of the dead insect makes you realize that the intent behind the slap was positive — it was intended to protect you, not to harm you. In other words, once you realize that slapping you was motivated by a positive intent, it becomes a positive, welcomed act, which renders your initial response inappropriate. Having acted on your misinterpretation of the other person’s intent is likely to make you feel very uncomfortable — awkward, regretful, and profoundly apologetic.
As we mature, we gain experience in interacting with others and, based on our interpersonal successes and failures, develop a degree of confidence in the accuracy of our brain’s intent interpreter function. Solid confidence in one’s ability to make accurate assessments of others’ intent supports one’s ability to trust, and conversely, a lack of confidence makes it difficult to trust. Trust, in turn, is crucial for creating and sustaining intimacy (Larzelere & Huston, 1980; Rempel et al., 1985; Feeney & Collins, 2015). Given that, as a defining trait, humans fail to thrive without intimate connections, any disruption in the normal processes that lead to developing trust is likely to have serious consequences (more on this elsewhere).
Intent and Art
Humanity’s relationship with art offers an interesting demonstration of the intent interpreter at work. As stated earlier, our brains attribute an intent to the behaviors of others around us continuously, automatically, and subconsciously. This applies to every human action and thus to every human product: The meaning of the product is inseparable from the intent attributed to its production (this is so regardless of when it was produced; for example, the Lascaux cave paintings, estimated to have been produced about 17,000 years ago, are generally considered works of art, which express the interpretation of the intent behind their production). Since all deliberate acts are motivated by an intent (that exists on the continuum presented at the beginning of this chapter), the meaning of everything we produce similarly lies in the intent behind it.
The production of ‘art’ is motivated by a selfless intent (‘pure art’ is produced by ‘pure selflessness,’ neither of which is realistically attainable; in reality, it is a matter of degrees — the closer the intent is to ‘pure selflessness,’ the closer the product is to ‘pure art’). At the opposite end of the intent continuum, productions that register as motivated by a ‘pure selfish’ intent (similarly, an abstraction) will register as obscene. Hence, it can be said that the opposite of an artistic expression is an obscene expression.
As I understand it, productions perceived as motivated by a (mostly) selfish intent are automatically considered obscene. If they involve sexual themes, we refer to them as pornographic, but a production can be obscene without being sexual or pornographic. For example, muzak: To the extent that the producers of muzak, like the producers of pornography, are exclusively interested in their profit and have complete disregard for the needs of anybody else (i.e., the listener and the performers), their product is obscene.
Entertainment productions are automatically associated with a fair intent. In the aforementioned continuum of intent, fair intent is in the middle of the spectrum — above selfishness and self-centeredness and below generosity and selflessness; correspondingly, the entertainment product is in the middle of the spectrum, between pornography and art. In other words, producers of entertainment are motivated by profit, but not exclusively so; they are also attentive to the needs of other participants in the production as well as the needs of the consumers of their product.
As the subconsciously perceived intent behind a production moves beyond ‘fair’ in the direction of selflessness, the product automatically gains more artistic value. A work is considered ‘contemporary art’ when the intent behind it is perceived as leaning toward selflessness by contemporary consumers. When the intent is perceived to be selfless persistently, over a number of generations, it is considered classic art.
Love can be defined as the enthusiasm for selflessness. Hence, artistic expressions are expressions of love. Hence the saying (meant figuratively, but capturing something real): “all songs are love songs.”
REFERENCES
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8
Combs, D. R., Penn, D. L., Wicher, M., & Waldheter, E. (2007). The Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ): A new measure for evaluating hostile social-cognitive biases in paranoia. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 12(2), 128–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546800600787854
Erikson, E. H. (1982). The life cycle completed. Norton.
Feeney, B. C., & Collins, N. L. (2015). Thriving through relationships. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 22–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2014.11.009
Larzelere, R. E., & Huston, T. L. (1980). The dyadic trust scale: Toward understanding interpersonal trust in close relationships. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 42(3), 595–604. https://doi.org/10.2307/351903
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00076512
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