Applying "theory of mind": Theory and experiments

This paper investigates our capacity to attribute preferences to others. This ability is intrinsic to game theory, and is a central component of “Theory of Mind”, perhaps the capstone of social cognition. In particular, this component of theory of mind allows individuals to learn more rapidly in strategic environments with an element of novelty. We show here that the capacity to attribute preferences yields a clear advantage over less sophisticated approaches to strategic interaction (such as reinforcement learning) because it allows agents to extrapolate to novel circumstances information about counterparts’ preferences that was learned previously. We report experiments investigating this capacity in simple extensive form games. We find significant learning of others’ preferences, providing evidence for the presence and effectiveness of this aspect of theory of mind. Moreover, scores on standard measures of autism-spectrum tendencies are modest but significant determinants of individual speeds of learning, so our notion of theory of mind is related to the notion as it is understood in psychology. *Affiliation and mailing addresses—Kimbrough, and Robson: Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada., Robalino: Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY, USA. Email addresses— [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], respectively. We thank Bertille Antoine, Javier Espinosa, Dean Foster, Ben Greiner, Leanna Mitchell, Chris Muris, Krishna Pendakur, and Ricky Vohra for helpful discussions. The paper also benefited from comments by participants in seminars at CERGE-EI, RIT, and the University of Arkansas as well as conference attendees at the Economic Science Association North American Conference in Santa Cruz, CA. Kimbrough and Robson acknowledge support from the SSHRC SFU Small Grants Program; Kimbrough thanks the SSHRC Insight Development Grants Program; Robalino and Robson thank the Human Evolutionary Studies Program at SFU; Robson thanks the Guggenheim Foundation, the Canada Research Chair Program and the SSHRC Insight Grants Program. Some of the analysis was performed using the open source statistical software R (R Development Core Team, 2013).