Using Our Theory of Mind for Inferences in Strategic Reasoning

Prior investigations into theory of mind have used strategic games to examine how an opponent’s known preferences are used to determine behavior. However, in the social setting, preferences are not always known. Mental state information often comes from observing another person’s decision and inferring what motivated that decision. This study extended the strategic game framework to explore the levels of reasoning used when making these types of inferences. The participants were 47 undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Each participant received game cards with decisions coming from a “prior player ” and was asked if particular choices for that player’s missing payoff information could have led to those decisions. The responses to these questions indicated whether participants attributed a strategy to the prior player that anticipated the next game move (a “predictive ” strategy) or did not (a “myopic ” strategy). The initially assumed strategy was found to be neutral, with predictive inferences becoming more common in successive game sets. These results support the role of experience in engaging greater depths of reasoning when interpreting another person’s decisions, even in the absence of feedback to influence this shift. Additionally, the task of being instructed to interpret another person’s decisions may engage in-depth theory of mind reasoning more readily than is naturally assumed during an occurring interaction. Further experiments are necessary to determine if and how the findings from abstract games correspond to real-world theory of mind use