Mind-ception: Investigating the relationship between theory of mind and decision making

•  Much of our decision making (DM) requires either direct or indirect considerations of others’ thoughts (McCubbins, et al., 2012).

•  Theory of Mind (ToM – the capacity to infer the thoughts/intentions of others) is an ability intrinsic to game theory (which underlies much of economic research concerning DM – von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944) as attributing preferences to others sets up strategic game play (Kimbrough et al., 2014)

•  DM also shares cognitive and neural components with the ToM as proposed by Shamay-Tsoory et al. (2009, 2010)

•  However, the research is mixed regarding the relationship between ToM and DM. A number of studies have found no relationship between the two abilities (Torralva et al., 2007; Torralva et al., 2013; Xi et al., 2011)

•  Here we explore the relationship between ToM and Decision Making across ToM and decision tasks and within a novel application of a matrix decision task