Coherence-based Processes in (Non-)Strategic Social Decision

• Applicant: Dr. Marc Jekel
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541866380

In social situations, decision-making can be broadly categorized into two types: non-strategic and strategic. Non-strategic social decision-making involves making decisions where the consequences are independent of the decisions made by others. This can include situations where individuals decide how to distribute resources among themselves and others based on their social preferences. On the other hand, strategic social decision-making is interdependent, such as in decisions that determine the contribution to a public good. In these cases, the outcomes of decisions depend on the choices made by others. Therefore, individuals must anticipate the actions of others, leading to strategic considerations in decision-making. To enhance our understanding of the evaluative and attentional dynamics underlying social decision-making, our project aims to expand an established artificial network-model of individual decision-making by incorporating both non-strategic and strategic social decision aspects. The unique key prediction of this model is the coherence effect prediction. This posits that individuals have a positively biased payoff evaluation of their preferred option while unfavourably assessing the payoffs of the alternative. To substantiate our model, we plan to conduct studies across three experimental branches. In the first branch, we will examine how social preferences impact choices, evaluations of payoffs, and other process measures, such as decision time and confidence ratings, in non-strategic allocation tasks. To detail the potential effect of coherence on the underlying cognitive processes, we will investigate active search and attentional processes in such allocation tasks in the second branch. In the third branch, we will expand the model further to account for strategic decision-making in a public-good game. We will compare the model in all branches with established models, such as ‘as-if’ utility models of social decision-making and a multi-attribute attentional drift-diffusion model. By employing a consistent model framework, our project bridges various research fields, focusing on coherence-based processes in non-strategic and strategic social decision-making.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Susann Fiedler