The Role of Mentalizing in Coordinating Cooperative Behavior and Social Norm Cognition

Abstract

Human cooperation is unparalleled in the natural world and is a defining feature of human social life—it shapes nearly every social interaction we experience, from geopolitical conflict, to collective bargaining, to team collaboration. However, cooperation also presents a challenge—it is often personally costly or risky to cooperate. How are humans able to overcome these costs and risks in favor of the interest of the group? To address this question, it is important to investigate the cognitive abilities that allow us to successfully cooperate with others. One important ability for cooperation is mentalizing—the ability to represent other agents’ beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions. The ability to think about other agents’ minds in order to predict how they will behave (e.g., whether they will cooperate or free-ride) is an important component of our own cooperative behavior, particularly in the context of coordination—a type of cooperative interaction where cooperation is mutually beneficial but risky. I test the idea that our ability to represent the beliefs of others plays a critical role in successful cooperation. Studies 1 and 2 examine one cognitive ability for representing others’ knowledge—common knowledge—that underlies cooperation by reducing uncertainty about others’ cooperative behavior. Studies 3 and 4 investigate how we make inferences about others’ beliefs from how they behave and how that influences our own cooperative behavior in the context of social norms. Studies 2 and 4 take a developmental approach to investigate how early emerging mentalizing is for cooperative behavior to better understand how foundational it is in social cognition. Altogether, the results of these studies suggest that the ability to represent other agents’ beliefs in order to predict their behavior plays a fundamental role in supporting successful cooperation.