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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Coffee or Date? A Bayesian account of Indirect Disclosure in High-Stakes Social Interactions

Victor Btesh¹, David Lagnado¹; ¹University College London

Presenter: Victor Btesh

We present a computational model of how people navigate high-stakes social interactions in which they want to disclose sensitive information but are unsure how the other person will react. We show that indirect communication emerges from recursive pragmatic inference over a simple endorsement structure: asking someone for coffee entails both friendship and romance, while a date rules out friendship alone. People's actions are guided by utilities resting on inferences over the belief states of others, and these goals can be at odds. In romantic settings, people only acted directly when certain their feelings would be reciprocated; otherwise they chose indirect actions to probe the other while protecting their own intimacy. Our model captures these trade-offs via two quantities beyond a desire for a positive response: strategic ambiguity, a motivation to obscure one's true goal, and motivated search for alignment, an interest in learning about the other's goal insofar as it matches one's own. Together, these components closely match participants' behaviour across 6 cover stories and 6 levels of uncertainty over the listener's belief state, providing evidence that high-level social goals are represented as information-theoretic quantities computed over a Bayesian Theory of Mind.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition