A Decision Network Account of Reasoning About Other People's Choices

Overview

Journal Cognition

Publisher Elsevier

Specialty Psychology

Date 2015 May 27

PMID 26010559

Citations 7

Authors

Alan Jern

Charles Kemp

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The ability to predict and reason about other people's choices is fundamental to social interaction. We propose that people reason about other people's choices using mental models that are similar to decision networks. Decision networks are extensions of Bayesian networks that incorporate the idea that choices are made in order to achieve goals. In our first experiment, we explore how people predict the choices of others. Our remaining three experiments explore how people infer the goals and knowledge of others by observing the choices that they make. We show that decision networks account for our data better than alternative computational accounts that do not incorporate the notion of goal-directed choice or that do not rely on probabilistic inference.

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