When engaging in social interaction, people rely on their ability to reason about unobservable mental content of others, which includes goals, intentions, and beliefs. This so-called theory of mind ability allows them to more easily understand, predict, and influence the behavior of others. People even use their theory of mind to reason about the theory of mind of others, which allows them to understand sentences like ‘Alice believes that Bob does not know about the surprise party’. But while the use of higher orders of theory of mind is apparent in many social interactions, empirical evidence so far suggests that people do not use this ability spontaneously when playing strategic games, even when doing so would be highly beneficial. In this paper, we attempt to encourage participants to engage in higher-order theory of mind reasoning by letting them play a game against computational agents. Since previous research suggests that competitive games may encourage the use of theory of mind, we investigate a particular competitive game, the Mod game, which can be seen as a much larger variant of the well-known rock–paper–scissors game. By using a combination of computational agents and Bayesian model selection, we simultaneously determine to what extent people make use of higher-order theory of mind reasoning, as well as to what extent computational agents can encourage the use of higher-order theory of mind in their human opponents. Our results show that participants who play the Mod game against computational theory of mind agents adjust their level of theory of mind reasoning to that of their computer opponent. Earlier experiments with other strategic games show that participants only engage in low orders of theory of mind reasoning. Surprisingly, we find that participants who knowingly play against second- and third-order theory of mind agents apply up to fourth-order theory of mind themselves, and achieve higher scores as a result.

中文翻译：

---

使用人工代理训练心理理论的使用

在进行社交互动时，人们依靠自己的能力来推理他人无法观察到的心理内容，包括目标，意图和信念。这种所谓的心理能力理论使他们更容易理解，预测和影响他人的行为。人们甚至使用他们的心理理论来推理其他人的心理理论，这使他们能够理解诸如“爱丽丝认为鲍勃不了解惊喜聚会”之类的句子。但是，尽管在许多社会互动中显然都使用了较高的心智理论，但迄今为止的经验证据表明，人们在玩战略游戏时不会自发地使用这种能力，即使这样做会非常有益。在本文中，我们试图通过让参与者与计算主体进行博弈来鼓励参与者从事高级思维推理理论。由于先前的研究表明竞争性游戏可能会鼓励人们运用心智理论，因此我们研究了一种特殊的竞争性游戏Mod游戏，它可以看作是著名的剪刀石头布游戏的较大变体。通过结合使用计算代理和贝叶斯模型选择，我们可以同时确定人们在多大程度上利用高级思维理论，以及在多大程度上可以鼓励人们使用高级思维理论。他们的人类对手。我们的结果表明，针对心理智能体的计算理论进行Mod博弈的参与者将其心理推理的水平调整为计算机对手的心理推理水平。早期对其他策略性游戏的实验表明，参与者仅从事低级的心智推理理论。出乎意料的是，我们发现故意与二阶和三阶心理理论相抗衡的参与者自己也适用于四阶心理理论，因此得分更高。