Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking? An Evaluation of a Simplified Theory of Mind

We examine the effectiveness of an agent’s approximate theory of mind when interacting with human players in a wartime negotiation game. We first measure how accurately the agent’s theory of mind captured the players’ actual behavior. We observe significant overlap between the players’ behavior and the agents’ idealized expectations, but we also observe significant deviations. Forming an incorrect expectation about a person is not inherently damaging, so we then analyzed how different deviations affected the game outcomes. We observe that many classes of inaccuracy in the agent’s theory of mind did not hurt the agent’s performance and, in fact, some of them played to the agent’s benefit. The results suggest potential advantages to giving an agent a computational model of theory of mind that is overly simplified, especially as a first step when investigating a domain with as much uncertainty as wartime negotiation.

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