Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do speakers craft misleading messages while remaining literally truthful? Can listeners resist such manipulation? We propose that while speakers rely on Theory of Mind to convey strategically underinformative messages, listeners need the same capacity—reasoning about speakers' goals—to avoid being misled. We formalize this by extending the Rational Speech Act framework to speakers with persuasive goals. The model predicts that (1) persuasive speakers rationally exploit underinformativity to frame information favorably, but (2) listeners' ability to correct for such bias depends on whether they actively reason about speaker goals. Experiment 1 confirms that human speakers systematically shift toward underinformativity when the evidence conflicts with their persuasive goals. Experiment 2 reveals an asymmetry: despite knowing that speakers may have persuasive motives, listeners exhibit low sensitivity to underinformativity. These results suggest that recursive social reasoning in strategic communication may be asymmetric—speakers exploit pragmatic inference, but listeners do not fully reciprocate with epistemic vigilance.