Abstract
Life in our social world depends on predicting and interpreting other people's behavior. Do such inferences always require us to explicitly represent people's mental states, or do we sometimes bypass such mentalistic inferences and rely instead on cues from the environment? We provide evidence for such behaviorist thinking by testing judgments about agents' decision-making under uncertainty, comparing agents who were knowledgeable about the quality of each decision option to agents who were ignorant. Participants believed that even ignorant agents were most likely to choose optimally, both in explaining (Experiment 1) and in predicting behavior (Experiment 2), and assigned them greater responsibility when acting in an objectively optimal way (Experiment 3).
| Original language | English (US) |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 |
| Publisher | The Cognitive Science Society |
| Pages | 695-700 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780991196708 |
| State | Published - 2014 |
| Event | 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 - Quebec City, Canada Duration: Jul 23 2014 → Jul 26 2014 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 |
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Conference
| Conference | 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 |
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| Country/Territory | Canada |
| City | Quebec City |
| Period | 7/23/14 → 7/26/14 |
Funding
This research was partially supported by funds awarded to the first author by the Yale University Department of Psychology. We thank Laurie Santos and an audience at Yale University for helpful discussion.
Keywords
- explanation
- lay decision theory
- prediction
- rationality
- Theory of mind
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science Applications
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Cognitive Neuroscience