Theory of Mind

Adventures in Flatland: Perceiving Social Interactions Under Physical Dynamics

People make fast, spontaneous, and consistent judgements of social situations, even in complex physical contexts with multiple-body dynamics (e.g. pushing, lifting, carrying, etc.). What mental computations make such judgments possible? Do people …

Look before you leap: Quantitative tradeoffs between peril and reward in action understanding

When we reason about the goals of others, how do we balance the positive outcomes that actions led to, with the potentially bad ways those actions could have ended? In a four-part experiment, we tested whether and how adults (full study) and 6- to …

Modal Prospection

Drawing together the metaphysics of counterfactuals with empirical work on intuitive judgments, this chapter discusses the nature of counterfactual reasoning about self-involving possibilities. It argues that when a person reasons about her …

Outcome or Strategy? A Bayesian Model of Intelligence Attribution.

People have a common-sense notion of intelligence and use it to evaluate decisions and decision-makers. One can attribute intelligence by evaluating the strategy or the outcome of a goal-directed agent. We propose a model of intelligence attribution, …