Who went fishing? Inferences from social evaluations

Abstract

Humans have a remarkable ability to go beyond the observable. From seeing the current state of our shared kitchen, we can infer what happened and who did it. Prior work has shown how the physical state of the world licenses inferences about the causal history of events, and the agents that participated in these events. Here, we investigate a previously unstudied source of evidence about what happened: social evaluations. In our experiment, we present situations in which a group failed to optimally coordinate their actions. Participants learn how much each agent was blamed for the outcome, and their task is to make inferences about the situation, the agents' actions, as well as the agents' capabilities. We develop a computational model that accurately captures participants' inferences. The model assumes that people blame others by considering what they should have done, and what causal role their action played. By inverting this generative model of blame, people can figure out what happened.

Group coordination catalyzes individual and cultural intelligence

“…ToM was found to be crucial for allowing groups to distribute specialized roles and collaboratively solve tasks with many interlocking parts and dependencies (see also Davis, Allen, & Gerstenberg, 2021;Tang et al, 2022;Kleiman-Weiner, Ho, Austerweil, Littman, & Tenenbaum, 2016;Carroll et al, 2019). Through joint planning and delegation, greater diversity of knowledge can be maintained, with diversity playing a key role in allowing groups to more flexibly solve problems and preventing early convergence (Campbell, Izquierdo, & Goldstone, 2022;Barkoczi, Analytis, & Wu, 2016).…”

Stop, children what’s that sound? Multi-modal inference through mental simulation

“…For example, adult participants can infer what path someone took based on the location of cookie crumbs on the floor (Lopez-Brau et al, 2020), or infer whether there is an object or an agent behind a curtain based on the pattern of sounds that were generated (Schachner & Kim, 2018;Kim & Schachner, 2021). The scope of such inferences extends beyond the physical world: from the surprised look on a friend's face, we can infer that something unexpected must have happened (Wu et al, 2021), and when one person gets blamed more than another, we get a sense for what each person must have done (Davis et al, 2021).…”