ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, I address the mental processes that are closely related to intentions and actions at a conceptual level (e.g. expectations, attributions). These are discussed in theories on motivation and social psychology (e.g. attitudes, Maio & Haddock, 2015; attribution and attributional theories; Horhota et al., 2014; Kelley & Michela, 1980; expectation-value models, Wigfield & Cambria, 2010; social cognition approach, Gawronski & Strack, 2012; Wegener & Petty, 2013). Other processes such as perception, learning, and memory refer to basic information processing and will be used to illustrate the short-term perspective of ISD. It should become evident that many of these processes are in part sub-intentional and automatically regulated and therefore cannot be trained with intentional effort. Nonetheless, they are involved when individuals pursue goals and solve problems. The final part of the chapter concludes with some caveats or difficulties that arise when one tries to disentangle the processes that are characteristic of the concept of human action. The concepts of action, intention, and attitude denote, in part, quite similar processes, but it is not quite clear whether they describe distinct events or indicate different descriptions of the same psychic phenomena.
