Short Biography

Bertram F. Malle was born in Graz, Austria, and studied psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Graz. After receiving his Master’s degrees in psychology and philosophy, he entered graduate school in psychology in the United States in 1990. Malle received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1995 and joined the faculty of the University of Oregon the same year. During his tenure at the University of Oregon, Dr. Malle also served as the Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences (2001-2007). He became Professor of Psychology in 2007, and in 2008 he joined Brown University. In his research, Dr. Malle focuses on social cognition, examining such issues as intentionality judgments, mental state inferences, behavior explanations, and moral judgments. He uses a wide variety of methodologies, including text content analysis, observations of social interaction, and chronometric assessments of social-cognitive processes. He was recipient of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award in 1995 and of a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1997. In 2009, he was president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Malle’s publications comprise over 70 articles and chapters as well as Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition (with L. J. Moses and D. A. Baldwin, eds., MIT Press, 2001); The Evolution of Language Out of Pre-language (with T. Givón, eds., Benjamins, 2002); How the Mind Explains Behavior: Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction (MIT Press, 2004); and Other minds: How humans bridge the divide between self and other (with S. D. Hodges, eds., Guilford, 2005).