Department of Psychology, Stanford University.
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Mar;45(3):e12926. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12926.
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking should depend on their expectations about the other's allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade-off between expected costs and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director-matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for "known unknowns" in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective-taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply "mindblind"; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource-rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints.
最近，关于成年人心理理论使用的争论因沟通中令人惊讶的换位思考失败而加剧，这表明换位思考可能相对费力。然而，成年人在需要时经常会进行费力的过程。那么，说话者和听话者应该如何分配资源以实现成功的沟通呢？我们首先观察到，沟通的共同目标诱导了自然的劳动分工：一个代理人选择分配用于换位思考的资源应该取决于他们对另一个代理人分配资源的期望。我们在一个资源理性模型中正式提出了这个想法，该模型用一种机制来增强最近的概率加权理论，以控制换位思考的程度（成本高昂）。在一系列模拟中，我们首先得出一个中间程度的换位思考权重，作为考虑换位思考的预期成本和收益的最优权衡。然后，我们提出了两个行为实验来测试我们模型的新预测。在实验 1 中，我们在导演-匹配任务中操纵遮挡物的存在与否。我们发现，说话者会自发地调整他们描述的信息量，以说明他们合作伙伴私人观点中的“已知未知”，这反映了比以前认识到的更高程度的说话者换位思考。在实验 2 中，我们比较了以前研究中使用的同伙脚本化话语和与未脚本化导演互动时产生的话语。我们发现，与存在遮挡物的情况相比，同伙的信息含量明显较少，但随着时间的推移，听众会利用违反情况来自适应地减少错误。总的来说，我们的工作表明，人们并不是简单的“心智盲”；他们使用上下文适当的期望来与他们的伙伴进行劳动分工。我们讨论了资源理性框架如何为理解在处理约束下灵活的换位思考提供更深入的解释基础。
