Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We propose a formal model of humans’ intuitive theories of others’ emotions. From a single choice in a social interaction(e.g. the choice to cooperate in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game), human observers can infer a player’s complex values, such asprosocial preferences and reputational concerns. When the player then experiences a new situation (the game’s outcome),observers infer the player’s reaction to the event based on the mental state likely to have produced the player’s action. Herewe capture this process by inverting a richly structured generative model of social gameplay, including social equity andreputational dimensions, and translate players’ subjective motivations, expectations, and prediction errors into forwardpredictions of the emotional experiences of the players. Our model infers players’ values and expectations, generatespatterns of play that match observers’ intuitions, and supports formally generated emotion predictions with substantiallyextended breadth and nuance.