Abstract

People are amateur social psychologists: they explain other people’s behavior, infer what other people are thinking and feeling, and predict how other people will act. I will refer to this sort of psychologizing as social reasoning in order to highlight the fact that it involves reasoning about people. Social reasoning often requires significant leaps of inductive inference: people infer others ’ mental states, such as their preferences, goals, and beliefs, from relatively sparse information, such as others ’ choices and actions. The capacity to reason about mental states and about how mental states relate to behavior is often referred

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