Adaptive Social Learning using Theory of Mind

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rational mentalizing model that explains how humans balance social and non-social learning by estimating the utility of social information through reasoning about others' goals and actions.

Contribution

It presents a novel model of social learning decision-making that incorporates theory of mind to predict human behavior in social learning scenarios.

Findings

Model accurately predicts human trade-offs between social and non-social learning.

Agents using the model learn to apply social learning more efficiently.

The approach demonstrates the importance of reasoning about others in social learning.

Abstract

Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans don't always choose to observe others, since social learning can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance social and non-social learning? In this paper, we propose a rational mentalizing model of the decision to engage in social learning. This model estimates the utility of social learning by reasoning about the other agent's goal and the informativity of their future actions. It then weighs the utility of social learning against the utility of self-exploration (non-social learning). Using a multi-player treasure hunt game, we show that our model can quantitatively capture human trade-offs between social and non-social learning. Furthermore, our results indicate that these two components allow agents to flexibly apply social learning to achieve their goals more efficiently.