Reasoning from social information enables efficient human intelligence

Humans have a remarkable capacity for efficient reasoning. We achieve a level of general intelligence far beyond that of any other species, and although artificial agents now exhibit many impressive, human-like abilities, they still require orders of magnitude more data than a human encounters in a lifetime. What, then, underlies our extraordinarily powerful yet efficient cognitive abilities? We examine one possibility: how people use social information to learn and reason in everyday life. We suggest that social reasoning directs us toward relevant information, enables inferences about others’ minds that support learning from minimal data, and provides cues for quickly assessing the accuracy of information. We also discuss how this necessary reliance on social reasoning leaves us vulnerable to exploitation, particularly in modern information environments such as social media. We conclude by considering large language models as an emerging challenge for social reasoning: the same cognitive tendencies that make us efficient social learners may leave us uniquely vulnerable to exploitation by these systems, yet theories of social reasoning also offer our best framework for anticipating and mitigating these risks.