People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals

Abstract

Beyond words and gestures, people have a remarkable capacity to also communicate through objects: A hat on a chair means it is occupied, rope hanging across an entrance means we should not cross, and objects placed in a closed box means they are not ours to take. How do people generate and interpret the social meaning of objects? We propose that this capacity emerges from our ability to reason about the motives behind other agents' actions. We show that a computational model that infers mental states based on how agents manipulate their environment spontaneously gives rise to the ability to communicate through objects. As predicted by our model, we found that people from both industrialized and non-industrialized societies can infer the communicative meaning of objects, even in the absence of a pre-existing convention. Moreover, we show that, after inferring the meaning of an unconventional object, people can store and retrieve its meaning in subsequent encounters, revealing a mechanism behind the widespread use of conventional communicative objects. Our model sheds light on how humans use their ability to interpret other people's behavior to embed social meaning into the physical world.

Social inferences from physical evidence via bayesian event reconstruction.

“…Consequently, our work does not test the extent to which people can infer complex mental states or personality traits from physical evidence. Recent work has found that people can indeed make rich communicative inferences from physical arrangements of objects (Lopez-Brau & Jara-Ettinger, 2020; Sarin et al, 2021); however, in this work, the position of the objects unambiguously revealed the agent’s actions (they positioned the objects where they were most visible to others). This work leaves open whether the capacity to infer these types of mental states extends to events where people must perform more complex forms of event reconstruction.…”