Humans flexibly integrate social information despite interindividual differences in reward.

ABSTRACT: There has been much progress in understanding human social learning, including recent studies integrating social information into the reinforcement learning framework. Yet previous studies often assume identical payoffs between observer and demonstrator, overlooking the diversity of social information in real-world interactions. We address this gap by introducing a socially correlated bandit task that accommodates payoff differences among participants, allowing for the study of social learning under more realistic conditions. Our Social Generalization (SG) model, tested through evolutionary simulations and two online experiments, outperforms existing models by incorporating social information into the generalization process, but treating it as noisier than individual observations. Our find

SUBMITTER: Witt A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11441569 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature