Humans flexibly integrate social information despite interindividual differences in reward

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Witt, Alexandra; Toyokawa, Wataru; Lala, Kevin N.; Gaissmaier, Wolfgang; Wu, Charley M.
• 署名单位: Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen; University of Konstanz; RIKEN; University of St Andrews
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-10209
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2404928121
• 发表日期: 2024-09-24
• 关键词: learning strategies; BIAS; exploration; selection; matters; others

摘要

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 findings suggest that human social learning is more flexible than previously believed, with the SG model indicating a potential resource- rational trade-off where social learning partially replaces individual exploration. This research highlights the flexibility of humans' social learning, allowing us to integrate social information from others with different preferences, skills, or goals.