Transcending the physical: Being social and identifying transcendental meaning in behavior

Behavior can be identified in terms of purpose/meaning (high-level behavior identities) or mechanics (low-level behavior identities) and the level at which behavior is identified can have far-reaching effects on specific high-order thinking processes. The present experiments link a social orientation to behavior-identification level and show that creating a social orientation engages high-level behavior identification. In three experiments, participants were shown behaviors and indicated whether a specified low-level or high-level identification of each behavior matched the way they interpret the behavior. Participants who completed this task while anticipating (vs. not anticipating) social interaction, in the presence (vs. absence) of eye images, or following exposure to social-interaction (vs. control) words indicated more high-level identifications. Participants who completed this task following exposure to privacy-denoting (vs. control) words, however, indicated fewer high-level identifications.