From Partners to Populations: A Hierarchical Bayesian Account of Coordination and Convention

Robert D. Hawkins, Michael Franke, Michael C. Frank, Adele E. Goldberg, Kenny Smith, Thomas L. Griffiths, Noah D. Goodman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Languages are powerful solutions to coordination problems: They provide stable, shared expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our heads. Yet, language use in a variable and nonstationary social environment requires linguistic representations to be flexible: Old words acquire new ad hoc or partner-specific meanings on the fly. In this article, we introduce continual hierarchical adaptation through inference (CHAI), a hierarchical Bayesian theory of coordination and convention formation that aims to reconcile the long-standing tension between these two basic observations. We argue that the central computational problem of communication is not simply transmission, as in classical formulations, but continual learning and adaptation over multiple timescales. Partner-specific common ground quickly emerges from social inferences within dyadic interactions, while community-wide social conventions are stable priors that have been abstracted away from interactions with multiple partners.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalPsychological Review
DOIs
StateAccepted/In press - 2022

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Psychology(all)

Keywords

  • Communication
  • Convention
  • Coordination
  • Generalization
  • Learning

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'From Partners to Populations: A Hierarchical Bayesian Account of Coordination and Convention'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this