The Kraemer Effect Reconsidered: Do Probability-Raising Accounts of Intentionality Explain the Kraemer Effect?

People tend to judge that agents bring about the ends more intentionally than the means. In threeexperiments, we test a new explanation for this so-called Kraemer Effect: people tend to judgethat agents bring about the ends more intentionally than the means because they think that theagent’s actions increase the probability of the ends more than the means, even though theirobjective probabilities are the same. In Experiment 1, we replicated the Kraemer Effect inEnglish and German. In Experiment 2, we aimed to manipulate people’s perceived probabilityincrease of bringing about the ends and test whether this would decrease the size of the KraemerEffect. In Experiment 3, we aimed to manipulate people’s perceived probability increase ofbringing about the means and test whether this would decrease the size of the Kraemer Effect. Inboth experiments, we found no evidence that manipulating the perceived probability increase ofbringing about the means or the ends decreased the size of the Kraemer Effect. Overall, we foundno evidence that a probability-raising account of intentionality explains the Kraemer Effect.