Recursive Mind Reading Is Adapted to Reputation Management

Recursive mind reading involves representing what others think we think—building higher level metarepresentations. We argue that humans’ partner choice ecology is such that it is adaptive to recognize when others’ motives are reputational and also to manage one’s reputation in view of the fact that others recognize and attend to reputational incentives. This makes recursive mind reading adaptive in a partner choice ecology. In order to substantiate this claim, we tested whether recursive mind reading is efficiently recruited in situations relevant to partner choice. In Study 1 (N = 230), we use hypothetical scenarios from daily life in which a protagonist makes a prosocial choice observed by an audience whose importance varies across conditions. We show that observers make inferences about the reputational motives of the protagonists on the basis of this minimal change. In Study 2 (N = 87), we use an economic game to investigate whether participants anticipate that their reputational motives will be recognized by observers and potentially affect their choice of collaborators, and show that people adapt their strategies to whether their reputational motives are revealed or hidden from observers. Our results suggest that participants go through multiple levels of recursive mind reading to solve the cognitive tasks characteristic of partner choice ecologies: evaluating others’ disposition to cooperate and presenting oneself as being so disposed.