Social Intelligence

All of the most remarkable accomplishments of human intelligence, from space programs to vaccination policies to raising children, rely fundamentally on coordination of individual minds. A challenge for such coordination is that each mind is invisible to the others. So the core structure of social intelligence is the ability to 

1. infer other people’s beliefs, desires, and emotions from observation, 
2. predict other people’s future actions and reactions given those mental states, and 
3. plan actions and interactions with other people that will generate desired reactions and avoid undesired ones. 

Humans make these inferences easily and systematically. Current computational models, built using the "inverse planning framework, " capture these inferences well— at least in the simple examples that have been studied so far.