Predicting Behavior from the World: Naive Behaviorism in Lay Decision Theory

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).