A Computational Model of Second-Order Social Reasoning

This paper presents the first computational cognitive model of second-order social reasoning. The model uses a decision tree strategy to reason about the opponent’s behavior. We hypothesize that a decision tree strategy requires (1) declarative memory, and (2) working memory. Declarative memory is required to retrieve successive reasoning steps, while working memory is required to temporarily store these reasoning steps while the next step is retrieved from memory. The model fit on data from a social reasoning game supports the validity of the model. This initial result leads to an explicit prediction for an experiment in which the reasoning game is combined with another task that requires the same cognitive resources as hypothesized by the model. This work is a first step towards understanding higher-order social reasoning from a cognitive modeling perspective.