Intention is a whopper, because here in North America, at least, we live in a society that prizes and rewards self-reported virtue over witness-reported honor. That means that you can move through the world believing yourself to be a good and decent person even with heaps of evidence to the contrary piling up against you. “Look, I mean well,” you might say. And that’s probably true. What we know about creating good fictional villains is equally applicable in real life: almost nobody believes that they are doing the wrong thing. And indeed, intention does count for something, just not very much of the thing. I talk to my six-year-old about intention a lot, because he has friends who are also six, and six-year-olds, generally lacking in refined agility, have a tendency to plow into, knock over, and otherwise pulverize each other at alarming rates. I want him to understand that he doesn’t have to assume that he and little Timmy aren’t friends anymore just because Timmy accidentally knocked him over. The fact that the action was an accident warrants acknowledgment. But then—and this is the important part—I ask Timmy to apologize anyway, because whether intentionally or not, he has hurt his playmate, and needs to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. In my six-year-old’s school, first graders do this by straight-up apologizing and then asking what they can do to help the person who got hurt feel better. Can you imagine how quickly we could start moving things along if adults took a similar approach?