Ambivalence by design: A computational account of loopholes

Loopholes offer an opening. Rather than comply or directly refuse, people can subvert an intended request by an intentional misunderstanding. Such behaviors exploit ambiguity and under-specification in language. Using loopholes is commonplace and intuitive in everyday social interaction, both familiar and consequential. Loopholes are also of concern in the law, and increasingly in artificial intelligence. However, the computational and cognitive underpinnings of loopholes are not well understood. Here, we propose a utility-theoretic recursive social reasoning model that formalizes and accounts for loophole behavior. The model captures the decision process of a loophole-aware listener, who trades off their own utility with that of the speaker, and considers an expected social penalty for non-cooperative behavior. The social penalty is computed through the listener’s recursive reasoning about a virtual naive observer’s inference of a naive listener’s social intent. Our model captures qualitative patterns in previous data, and also generates new quantitative predictions consistent with novel studies (N $=$ 265). We consider the broader implications of our model for other aspects of social reasoning, including plausible deniability and humor.