Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of Knowing When to Leave Someone Isn’t Easy: Social Foraging with Partners of Varying Cooperation Levels, by William Lee, Degree ScM., Brown University, October 2019. Although on average, we meet over 1000 new people every year, we typically only maintain close relationships with five people at a time. How then do we evaluate the myriad of potential people we could be friends with and decide to invest our time and energy in just a few select individuals? One perspective, taken from foraging theory, suggests that people should continually evaluate their current relationships against an estimated value of other potential unknown partners. While we know from decades of research that people maximize rewards during decision-making tasks using this method, it remains unknown whether these mechanisms also underlie social choices. Here, we examine whether optimal foraging theory can describe how humans evaluate and choose to stay with social partners. In a novel paradigm, subjects play an economic game with partners of varying moral quality and decide whether to continue their partnership or spend the time to find a new partner. In two different conditions, we vary the amount of “good” (cooperative) and “bad” (defector) partners to investigate how environmental quality influences how subjects update their evaluation of partners. Results reveal that regardless of the average cooperation level of the environment, subjects stay with partners for far longer than they ought to have (i.e., they over-exploit according to optimal foraging theory). Computational modeling reveals that these sub-optimal choices were driven by inaccurate estimations of the optimal exit strategy (reward at which a person should leave) than an ability to stick to a consistent decision-making strategy. Together, these findings reveal that social traits, such as cooperation, influence foraging behavior in a way that is not currently captured in human foraging literature.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Sc. M.)--Brown University, 2020
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Citation
Lee, William Montgomery,
"Knowing When to Leave Someone Isn’t Easy: Social Foraging with Partners of Varying Cooperation Levels"
(2020).
Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129499/
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Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences department....