In social settings, people often reason about unobservable mental content of other people, such as their beliefs, goals, or intentions. This ability helps them to understand and predict the behavior of others. People can even take this ability further, and use higher-order theory of mind to reason about the way others use theory of mind, for example in ’Alice believes that Bob does not know about the surprise’. However, empirical evidence suggests that people do not spontaneously use higher-order theory of mind in strategic games. In this paper, we let participants negotiate with computational theory of mind agents in the setting of Colored Trails. We find that even though participants are unaware of the level of sophistication of their trading partner, within a few rounds of play, participants offers are more indicative of second-order theory of mind reasoning when their trading partner was using second-order theory of mind as well.

In this paper, we study cross-cultural differences in strategicreasoning in turn-taking games, as related to game-theoreticnorms as well as affective aspects such as trust, degrees of risk-taking and cooperation. We performed a game experiment toinvestigate how these aspects play a role in reasoning in simpleturn-based games, known as centipede-like games, across threecultures, that of The Netherlands, Israel and India. While thereis no significant main effect of nationalities on the behaviourof players across games, certain unexpected interactive effectsare found in their behaviour in particular games.

We investigated the impact of linguistic cues and autistic traits on lie detection. Adult participants (N = 125) judged suspects' statements in a detective game. Untruthful statements were marked by semantic leakage. Literature indicates that liars use fewer first-person pronouns and mental-state terms than truth-tellers. We manipulated the untruthful statements for the presence/absence of these cues to test their effect on lie detection. The adults were 89% accurate in detecting lies. Mental-state terms did not affect accuracy, while presence of first-person pronouns hindered it. Having autistic traits did not influence lie detection. However, adults with higher autistic traits struggled to detect lies when these contained both a first-person pronoun and a mental-state term. Post-hoc analysis revealed lower lie detection accuracy for longer sentences. Our findings underscore the significance of semantic leakage in lie detection, with nuanced effects of linguistic cues on accuracy, particularly for adults with higher autistic traits.