Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2012 Aug 5;367(1599):2224-33. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0124.
Theory of mind (ToM) is a great evolutionary achievement. It is a special intelligence that can assess not only one's own desires and beliefs, but also those of others. Whether it is uniquely human or not is controversial, but it is clear that humans are, at least, significantly better at ToM than any other animal. Economists and game theorists have developed sophisticated and powerful models of ToM and we provide a detailed summary of this here. This economic ToM entails a hierarchy of beliefs. I know my preferences, and I have beliefs (a probabilistic distribution) about your preferences, beliefs about your beliefs about my preferences, and so on. We then contrast this economic ToM with the theoretical approaches of neuroscience and with empirical data in general. Although this economic view provides a benchmark and makes useful suggestions about empirical tendencies, it does not always generate a close fit with the data. This provides an opportunity for a synergistic interdisciplinary production of a falsifiable theory of bounded rationality. In particular, a ToM that is founded on evolutionary biology might well be sufficiently structured to have predictive power, while remaining quite general. We sketch two papers that represent preliminary steps in this direction.
心理理论（Theory of mind，ToM）是一项伟大的进化成就。它是一种特殊的智力，不仅可以评估自己的欲望和信念，还可以评估他人的欲望和信念。它是否具有独特的人类特征存在争议，但很明显，人类在心理理论方面至少明显优于任何其他动物。经济学家和博弈论理论家已经开发出了复杂而强大的心理理论模型，我们在这里对其进行了详细总结。这种经济心理理论涉及到信念的层次结构。我知道自己的偏好，并且对您的偏好有信念（概率分布），对您对我偏好的信念有信念，依此类推。然后，我们将这种经济心理理论与神经科学的理论方法和一般的经验数据进行了对比。尽管这种经济观点提供了一个基准，并对经验趋势提出了有用的建议，但它并不总是与数据非常吻合。这为具有约束力的理性的可证伪理论的协同跨学科产生提供了机会。特别是，基于进化生物学的心理理论很可能具有足够的结构，从而具有预测能力，同时又保持相当的通用性。我们勾勒了两篇代表该方向初步步骤的论文。
