Paper Detail
Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Samuel J. Gershman
Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans sometimes choose direct experience over social learning, which can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance social and non-social learning? 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 another agent's goal and the informativeness of their future actions. It then weighs the utility of social learning against the utility of non-social learning. Using a novel game where players choose between observing other agents or exploring the environment, we show that the Rational Mentalizing model can quantitatively capture human trade-offs between these strategies. These findings suggest that selective social learning is guided by 'Theory of Mind' in the service of utility maximization.
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@article{ying2026theory,
title = {Using Theory of Mind to Arbitrate between Social and Non-social Learning},
author = {Lance Ying and Ryan Truong and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Samuel J. Gershman},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans sometimes choose direct experience over social learning, which can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance social and non-social learning? 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 another agent's goal and the informativeness of their future actions.},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28601},
keywords = {cs.MA, q-bio.NC},
eprint = {2607.28601},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}