Think! Evidence

Computational foundations of human social intelligence

Show simple item record

dc.contributor Joshua B. Tenenbaum.
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.creator Kleiman-Weiner, Max
dc.date 2019-03-01T19:52:31Z
dc.date 2019-03-01T19:52:31Z
dc.date 2018
dc.date 2018
dc.date.accessioned 2019-05-10T17:25:37Z
dc.date.available 2019-05-10T17:25:37Z
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120621
dc.identifier 1086609340
dc.identifier.uri https://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/1721.1/120621
dc.description Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2018.
dc.description Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
dc.description Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-211).
dc.description This thesis develops formal computational cognitive models of the social intelligence underlying human cooperation and morality. Human social intelligence is uniquely powerful. We collaborate with others to accomplish together what none of us could do on our own; we share the benefits of collaboration fairly and trust others to do the same. Even young children work and play collaboratively, guided by normative principles, and with a sophistication unparalleled in other animal species. Here, I seek to understand these everyday feats of social intelligence in computational terms. What are the cognitive representations and processes that underlie these abilities and what are their origins? How can we apply these cognitive principles to build machines that have the capacity to understand, learn from, and cooperate with people? The overarching formal framework of this thesis is the integration of individually rational, hierarchical Bayesian models of learning, together with socially rational multi-agent and game-theoretic models of cooperation. I use this framework to probe cognitive questions across three time-scales: evolutionary, developmental, and in the moment. First, I investigate the evolutionary origins of the cognitive structures that enable cooperation and support social learning. I then describe how these structures are used to learn social and moral knowledge rapidly during development, leading to the accumulation of knowledge over generations. Finally I show how this knowledge is used and generalized in the moment, across an infinitude of possible situations. This framework is applied to a variety of cognitively challenging social inferences: determining the intentions of others, distinguishing who is friend or foe, and inferring the reputation of others all from just a single observation of behavior. It also answers how these inferences enable fair and reciprocal cooperation, the computation of moral permissibility, and moral learning. This framework predicts and explains human judgment and behavior measured in large-scale multi-person experiments. Together, these results shine light on how the scale and scope of human social behavior is ultimately grounded in the sophistication of our social intelligence.
dc.description by Max Kleiman-Weiner.
dc.description Ph. D.
dc.format 211 pages
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language eng
dc.publisher Massachusetts Institute of Technology
dc.rights MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
dc.rights http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
dc.subject Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.title Computational foundations of human social intelligence
dc.type Thesis


Files in this item

Files Size Format View
1086609340-MIT.pdf 23.75Mb application/pdf View/Open

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record

Search Think! Evidence


Browse

My Account