Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we explore the Principle of Charity. This is an epistemic assumption that people should not judge people to be irrational unless they have an empirically justified account of what they are doing when they violate normative standards. Through two studies, we provide evidence in support of the principle. Study 1 suggests people believe others will arrive at the same conclusions they would themselves given the same information. Study 2 suggests that people assume others may differ in the subjective degrees of belief but that they broadly use the same (Bayesian) updating mechanism when evaluating information about other people. We believe this paper provides the first empirical test of this principle.