Social Preferences
social preferences
Prosocial Learning and Motivation across the Lifespan
2024 BACN Early-Career Prize Lecture Many of our decisions affect other people. Our choices can decelerate climate change, stop the spread of infectious diseases, and directly help or harm others. Prosocial behaviours – decisions that help others – could contribute to reducing the impact of these challenges, yet their computational and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. I will present recent work that examines prosocial motivation, how willing we are to incur costs to help others, prosocial learning, how we learn from the outcomes of our choices when they affect other people, and prosocial preferences, our self-reports of helping others. Throughout the talk, I will outline the possible computational and neural bases of these behaviours, and how they may differ from young adulthood to old age.
What to consider, when making strategic social decisions? An Eye-tracking investigation
In many societal problems, individuals exhibit a conflict between keeping resources (e.g., money, time or attention) to themselves or sharing them with another individual or group. The reasons motivating decisions in favor of others welfare can thereby vary from purely altruistic to completely strategic. Be it the stranger making an effort returning a lost valet to its rightful owner or a co-worker pitching in her fair share in a joint project. Actions like that create an environment that makes living together a pleasant experience. Hence, understanding how decisions determining the welfare of oneself and others are made is important for facilitating this behavior by building institutions that maximize the rate of cooperation in a society. To shed new light on such decision making processes I will present recent evidence from a set of process tracing experiments utilizing eye-tracking and economic games. Experiments will focus on the role of social preferences in the choice construction process and will identify mechanisms (i.e., search and processing depth, information weighting, and ignorance) through which they guide choice behavior. I will in particular focus on the differences and commonalitiesbetween strategic and altruistic decisions. Specifically, investigating to which extent people direct attention towards certain components of the decision situation in a context-dependent manner.