{"pk":26381,"title":"Conversational expectations account for apparent limits on theory of mind use","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Theory of mind is a powerful cognitive ability: by the ageof six, people are capable of accurately reasoning about oth-ers’ beliefs and desires. An influential series of language un-derstanding experiments by Keysar and colleagues, however,showed that adults systematically failed to take a speaker’sbeliefs into account, revealing limitations on theory of mind.In this paper we argue that these apparent failures are in factsuccesses. Through a minimal pair of replications comparingscripted vs. unscripted speakers, we show that critical utter-ances used by Keysar and colleagues are uncooperative: theyare less informative than what a speaker would actually pro-duce in that situation. When we allow participants to naturallyinteract, we find that listener expectations are justified and er-rors are reduced. This ironically shows that apparent failuresof theory of mind are in fact attributable to sophisticated ex-pectations about speaker behavior—that is, to theory of mind.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Theory of mind; social cognition; pragmatics"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5039f0w6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"X. D.","last_name":"Hawkins","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26381/galley/16017/download/"}]}