Intrachoice Dynamics Shape Social Decisions

Fadong Chen (), Zhi Zhu (), Qiang Shen (), Ian Krajbich () and Todd A. Hare ()
Additional contact information
Fadong Chen: School of Management, Neuromanagement Laboratory & The State Key Laboratory of Brain-machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University, 310058 Hangzhou, China
Zhi Zhu: School of Management, Neuromanagement Laboratory & The State Key Laboratory of Brain-machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University, 310058 Hangzhou, China
Qiang Shen: School of Business and Management, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence for Information Behavior, Shanghai International Studies University, 201613 Shanghai, China
Ian Krajbich: Department of Psychology & Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210
Todd A. Hare: Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics, Department of Economics, University of Zurich, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland

Management Science, 2024, vol. 70, issue 2, 1137-1153

Abstract: Do people have well-defined social preferences waiting to be applied when making decisions? Or do they have to construct social decisions on the spot? If the latter, how are those decisions influenced by the way in which information is acquired and evaluated? These temporal dynamics are fundamental to understanding how people trade off selfishness and prosociality in organizations and societies. Here, we investigate how the temporal dynamics of the choice process shape social decisions in three studies using response times and mouse tracking. In the first study, participants made binary decisions in mini-dictator games with and without time constraints. Using mouse trajectories and a starting time drift diffusion model, we find that, regardless of time constraints, selfish participants were delayed in processing others’ payoffs, whereas the opposite was true for prosocial participants. The independent mouse trajectory and computational modeling analyses identified consistent measures of the delay between considering one’s own and others’ payoffs (self-onset delay, SOD). This measure correlated with individual differences in prosociality and predicted heterogeneous effects of time constraints on preferences. We confirmed these results in two additional studies, one a purely behavioral study in which participants made decisions by pressing computer keys, and the other a replication of the mouse-tracking study. Together, these results indicate that people preferentially process either self or others’ payoffs early in the choice process. The intrachoice dynamics are crucial in shaping social preferences and might be manipulated via nudge policies (e.g., manipulating the display order or saliency of self and others’ outcomes) for behavior in managerial or other contexts.

Keywords: social preferences; information processing; drift diffusion model; mouse tracking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4732 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:70:y:2024:i:2:p:1137-1153

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().