Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We often make decisions on behalf of others, such as pickingout gifts or making restaurant recommendations. Yet, withoutdirect access to others’ preferences, our choices on behalf ofothers depend on what we think they like. Across twoexperiments, we examined whether and how accuratelypeople are able to infer others’ preferences by observing theirchoices. Our results suggest that people are capable of makingreasonably accurate predictions about what others will choosenext, given what they have chosen before. These results laythe groundwork to systematically study how people makenovel predictions about others’ preferences, and whendifferent strategies might be appropriate.