Theory-of-mind ability and cooperation

Garret Ridinger and Michael McBride

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2025, vol. 230, issue C

Abstract: The ability to accurately assess others’ intents, beliefs, and emotions—called Theory of Mind (ToM)—is important for social cooperation. We study the role of ToM ability in fostering cooperation in the Simultaneous and Sequential Prisoners Dilemma (PD) games. We theoretically examine multiple models of social preferences and find that the relationship between ToM ability and cooperation is complex and sensitive to subtle changes in context such as population characteristics, beliefs, and the sequencing of moves. To resolve the theoretical uncertainty, we conduct a series of experiments to test how ToM influences cooperation in one-shot PD interactions. We find that differences in ToM ability are not correlated with cooperation in Simultaneous PD, but that higher ToM ability is correlated with increased cooperation in Sequential PD. Moreover, ToM ability affects cooperation via accuracy in beliefs about others’ cooperativeness rather than an association with fixed preference traits. Finally, we show that when direct inference of emotional states is possible, individuals with high ToM ability are better at recognizing the potential cooperativeness of others, thereby enabling a payoff advantage to having high ToM. Overall, our paper demonstrates how individual-level differences in ToM help to explain differences in cooperativeness.

Keywords: Cooperation; Norms; Beliefs; Theory of mind (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C92 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268125000150
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:230:y:2025:i:c:s0167268125000150

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.106895

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().