Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People make sense of each others behavior by assuming that beliefs and desires vary across agents. We propose thatpeople are more conservative when it comes to risk: when an agent takes an extreme risk, we assume they have privilegedinformation rather than high risk tolerance. Participants watched an agent choose either to obtain three guaranteed tokens,or guess which box from a set had four tokens. After watching the agents choice, participants played the game themselves.In Study 1, participants were quicker to imitate an agent who immediately made extremely risky bets than one whostarted out making low-risk bets that became progressively riskier, suggesting that they inferred that risk-seeking agentswere knowledgeable. In Study 2, participants ceased taking risky bets when the anonymous agent did, suggesting thatparticipants choices depend on mental state inferences rather than contagious but mind-blind risk-seeking behavior.