October 01, 2025
Lake Forest College
RAD Lab students publish research on intentional action
A new paper co-authored by Associate Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience Paul Henne and students in Henne's Reasons and Decisions (RAD) Lab examines why people say agents act more intentionally with respect to an outcome than to the specific means that produce it—the Kraemer Effect.
The article, "The Kraemer Effect Reconsidered: Do probability-raising accounts of intentionality explain the Kraemer Effect?" builds directly on prior work by Henne and Carlotta Pavese, Fulford Clarendon Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Oxford University, who argued that differences in know-how—what agents are seen as knowing how to do—drive this asymmetry.
Wiktoria Pedryc '24, visiting student Benjamin Seiler, Alexander Max Bauer, Saniya Varghese '27, and Isaiah Moonlight '25 are listed as co-authors on the article. Advanced research opportunities such as this at an undergraduate level prime students for rigorous graduate programs. Pedryc, for example, has gone on to pursue a dual PhD in psychology and data analytics from Pennsylvania State University.
The project began in an undergraduate research meeting. Students in Henne’s lab discussed the Kraemer Effect alongside new probability-raising accounts of intentionality and their implications for law and moral psychology. The team asked a focused question: Do people judge ends more intentional than means because they think the action raises the probability of the end more than the means, even when the objective probabilities are the same?
Across three experiments, the team replicated the Kraemer Effect—including a cross-linguistic replication in English and German—and then directly manipulated participants’ perceptions of probability-raising for ends and means. These manipulations produced null results on the key predictions, so the authors had found no evidence in support of their hypothesis. The findings are consistent with the know-how account and help map the limits of probability-raising explanations of intentional action.
The project showcases interdisciplinary work in the humanities at Lake Forest College. Student researchers integrated data science, experimental design, and insights from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to address a live problem in the literature—one with clear stakes for legal reasoning about intent and for moral evaluation.