  Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising
failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that
perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and
listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We
begin with the observation that this shared goal induces a natural division of
labor: the resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking
should depend on their expectations about the other's allocation. We formalize
this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic
weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of
perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate
degree of perspective weighting as an optimal tradeoff between expected costs
and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments
testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the
presence or absence of occlusions in a director-matcher task and found that
speakers spontaneously produced more informative descriptions to account for
"known unknowns" in their partner's private view. In Experiment 2, we compared
the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced
in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were
systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the
presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer
errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply
"mindblind"; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the
division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource rational
framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding
flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints.
