EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Latent motives guide structure learning during adaptive social choice

Jeroen M. van Baar, Matthew R. Nassar, Wenning Deng and Oriel FeldmanHall ()
Additional contact information
Jeroen M. van Baar: Brown University
Matthew R. Nassar: Brown University
Wenning Deng: Brown University
Oriel FeldmanHall: Brown University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 3, 404-414

Abstract: Abstract Predicting the behaviour of others is an essential part of social cognition. Despite its ubiquity, social prediction poses a poorly understood generalization problem: we cannot assume that others will repeat past behaviour in new settings or that their future actions are entirely unrelated to the past. We demonstrate that humans solve this challenge using a structure learning mechanism that uncovers other people’s latent, unobservable motives, such as greed and risk aversion. In four studies, participants (N = 501) predicted other players’ decisions across four economic games, each with different social tensions (for example, Prisoner’s Dilemma and Stag Hunt). Participants achieved accurate social prediction by learning the stable motivational structure underlying a player’s changing actions across games. This motive-based abstraction enabled participants to attend to information diagnostic of the player’s next move and disregard irrelevant contextual cues. Participants who successfully learned another’s motives were more strategic in a subsequent competitive interaction with that player in entirely new contexts, reflecting that social structure learning supports adaptive social behaviour.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01207-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01207-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01207-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01207-4