Naïve epistemics: A theory of rational and error-prone mental state reasoning

Effective communication depends on reasoning about what others know and believe, and failures in executive functioning can disrupt the way adults reason about mental states. Studies reveal that failures in interpreting premises, simulating possibilities, and formulating conclusions can all yield systematic errors in reasoning - but no account exists of the specific sorts of error people produce when these failures occur in the context of mental state reasoning. We developed such a theory to account for both rational and error-prone mental state reasoning. The theory makes three proposals: first, people build representations of possibilities, and tag those representations, to distinguish knowledge from belief; second, they update, inspect, and consolidate representations of possibilities to engage in mental state reasoning; and third, they can integrate semantic contents into their representations of belief states by constructing or else blocking the construction of alternative possibilities. We tested the theory by examining the patterns of conclusions reasoners produced using a novel sentence construction interface or else through free response. These generative tasks permitted analyses of participants' tendency to draw sensible epistemic conclusions as well as their systematic errors, and they corroborate the central tenets of the theory.