Reaction times

Time people’s performance on a task.

How fast can they do it?

Use case

theory of mind

In everyday life, when we predict how other people are going to behave, are we more likely to base our predictions on what they think or on what they know? To answer this question, ask people to predict an agent's behavior as fast as they can. Have them do this many times. Time how long it takes them to make the prediction. From one trial to the next, vary whether you give them information about what the agent thinks or knows.  Are they reliably faster when given information of one type or the other?

In action

Knowledge Attributions and Behavioral Predictions

Lying, Fast and Slow

More Methods

Behavioral experiments

Social observation