What do people think they're doing? Action identification and human behavior.

Issues in the cognitive representation and control of action are broached from the perspective of action identification theory. This theory holds that any action can be identified in many ways, ranging from low-level identities that specify how the action is performed to high-level identities that signify why or with what effect the action is performed. The level of identification most likely to be adopted by an actor is said to be dictated by processes reflecting a trade-off between concerns for comprehensive action understanding and effective action maintenance. This means that the actor is always sensitive to contextual cues to higher levels of identification but moves to lower levels ofidentification if the action proves difficult to maintain with higher level identities in mind. These respective processes are documented empirically, as is their coordinated interplay in promoting a level of prepotent identification that matches the upper limits of the actors capacity to perform the action. The implications of this analysis are developed for action stability, the psychology of performance impairment, personal versus situational causation, and the behavioral bases of self-understanding. People always seem to be doing something. They also seem for seemingly unbounded constructions of behavior. As philosto be quite adept at identifying what they are doing. What is less ophers have long noted, any segment of behavior can be conclear is how these two observations relate to one another. The sciously identified in many different ways (Anscombe, 1957;