Incidental ostracism emerges from simple learning mechanisms

Simplifying social learning

Social learning is complex, but people often seem to navigate social environments with ease. This ability creates a puzzle for traditional accounts of reinforcement learning (RL) that assume people negotiate a tradeoff between easy-but-simple behavior (model-free learning) and complex-but-difficult behavior (e.g., model-based learning). We offer a theoretical framework for resolving this puzzle: although social environments are complex, people have social expertise that helps them behave flexibly with low cognitive cost. Specifically, by using familiar concepts instead of focusing on novel details, people can turn hard learning problems into simpler ones. This ability highlights social learning as a prototype for studying cognitive simplicity in the face of environmental complexity and identifies a role for conceptual knowledge in everyday reward learning.

Inferences about interdependence shape cooperation

During social interactions in daily life, people possess imperfect knowledge of their interdependence (i.e., how behaviors affect each person's outcomes), and what people infer about their interdependence can shape their behaviors. We review theory and research that suggests people can infer their interdependence with others along several dimensions, including mutual dependence, power, and corresponding-versus-conflicting interests. We discuss how perceptions of interdependence affect how people cooperate and punish others' defection in everyday life. We propose that people understand their interdependence with others through knowledge of the action space, cues during social interactions (e.g., partner behaviors), and priors based on experience. Finally, we describe how learning interdependence could occur through domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms.

Intensity, intent, and ambiguity: Appraisals of workplace ostracism and coping responses

Using both correlational and experimental designs across four studies (N = 1251 working individuals), the current project aimed to contribute to the understanding of workplace ostracism by studying two research questions. First, we tested whether the subjective experience of targets reflects the current theorizing of ostracism. Second, drawing from the transactional theory of stress and coping, we investigated whether this subjective experience impacts targets' coping responses. Findings based on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported the current theorizing of workplace ostracism such that perceived intensity, intent, and ambiguity were reflected in how targets appraised being ostracized at work. The appraisals were also related to coping responses. Perceived intensity predicted more approach-oriented (e.g., confrontation) and less avoidance-oriented coping responses (e.g., minimization). While attributions of intent also predicted some coping responses (e.g., instrumental support seeking), the explanatory power of perceived ambiguity was lower than the other two appraisals. Although these researcher-defined dimensions may be reflective of targets' experience, we propose that predictions made based on these dimensions need further refinement. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings are discussed in relation to how workplace ostracism is typically studied in the literature.

Indirect exclusion can promote cooperation in repeated group interactions

Social exclusion has been regarded as one of the most effective measures to promote the evolution of cooperation. In real society, the way in which social exclusion works can be direct or indirect. However, thus far there is no related work to explore how indirect exclusion influences the evolution of cooperation from a theoretical perspective. Here, we introduce indirect exclusion into the repeated public goods game where the game organizer probabilistically selects cooperators after the first game round to participate in the following possible game interactions. We then investigate the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation both in infinite and finite well-mixed populations. Through theoretical analysis and numerical calculations, we find that the introduction of indirect exclusion can induce the stable coexistence of cooperators and defectors or the dominance of cooperators, which thus effectively promotes the evolution of cooperation. Besides, we show that the identifying probability of the organizer has a nonlinear effect on public cooperation when its value is lower than an intermediate value, while the higher identifying probability can maintain a high level of cooperation. Furthermore, our results show that increasing the average rounds of game interactions can effectively promote the evolution of cooperation.

Joint effects of voluntary participation and group selection on the evolution of altruistic punishment

It is puzzling how altruistic punishment of defectors can evolve in large groups of nonrelatives, since punishers should voluntarily bear individual costs of punishing to benefit those who do not pay the costs. Although two distinct mechanisms have been proposed to explain the puzzle, namely voluntary participation and group-level competition and selection, insights into their joint effects have been less clear. Here we investigated what could be combined effects of these two mechanisms on the evolution of altruistic punishment and how these effects can vary with nonparticipants’ individual payoff and group size. We modelled altruistic punishers as those who contribute to a public good and impose a fine on each defector, i.e., they are neither pure punishers nor excluders. Our simulation results show that voluntary participation has negative effects on the evolution of cooperation in small groups regardless of nonparticipants’ payoffs, while in large groups it has positive effects within only a limited range of nonparticipants’ payoff. We discuss that such asymmetric effects could be explained by evolutionary forces emerging from voluntary participation. Lastly, we suggest that insights from social science disciplines studying the exit option could enrich voluntary participation models.

Early exclusion leads to cyclical cooperation in repeated group interactions

Explaining the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among selfish individuals from an evolutionary perspective remains a grand challenge in biology, economy and social sciences. Social exclusion is believed to be an answer to this conundrum. However, previously related studies often assume one-shot interactions and ignore how free-riding is identified, which seem to be too idealistic. In this work, we consider repeated interactions where excluders need to pay a monitoring cost to identify free-riders for exclusion and free-riders cannot participate in the following possible game interactions once they are identified and excluded by excluders in the repeated interaction process. We reveal that the introduction of such exclusion can prevent the breakdown of cooperation in repeated group interactions. In particular, we demonstrate that an evolutionary oscillation among cooperators, defectors and excluders can appear in infinitely large populations when early exclusion is implemented. In addition, we find that the population spends most of the time in states where cooperators dominate for early exclusion when stochastic mutation-selection is considered in finite populations. Our results highlight that early exclusion is successful in solving the mentioned enigma of cooperation in repeated group interactions.

A computational reward learning account of social media engagement

Social media has become a modern arena for human life, with billions of daily users worldwide. The intense popularity of social media is often attributed to a psychological need for social rewards (likes), portraying the online world as a Skinner Box for the modern human. Yet despite such portrayals, empirical evidence for social media engagement as reward-based behavior remains scant. Here, we apply a computational approach to directly test whether reward learning mechanisms contribute to social media behavior. We analyze over one million posts from over 4000 individuals on multiple social media platforms, using computational models based on reinforcement learning theory. Our results consistently show that human behavior on social media conforms qualitatively and quantitatively to the principles of reward learning. Specifically, social media users spaced their posts to maximize the average rate of accrued social rewards, in a manner subject to both the effort cost of posting and the opportunity cost of inaction. Results further reveal meaningful individual difference profiles in social reward learning on social media. Finally, an online experiment (n = 176), mimicking key aspects of social media, verifies that social rewards causally influence behavior as posited by our computational account. Together, these findings support a reward learning account of social media engagement and offer new insights into this emergent mode of modern human behavior.

Model-Based and Model-Free Social Cognition: Investigating the Role of Habit in Social Attitude Formation and Choice

Do habits play a role in our social impressions? To investigate the contribution of habits to the formation of social attitudes, we examined the roles of model-free and model-based reinforcement learning in social interactions - computations linked in past work to habit and planning, respectively. Participants in this study learned about novel individuals in a sequential reinforcement learning paradigm, choosing financial advisors who led them to high- or low-paying stocks. Results indicated that participants relied on both model-based and model-free learning, such that each type of learning was expressed in both advisor choices and post-task self-reported liking of advisors. Specifically, participants preferred advisors who could provide large future rewards as well as advisors who had provided them with large rewards in the past. Although participants relied more heavily on model-based learning overall, they varied in their use of model-based and model-free learning strategies, and this individual difference influenced the way in which learning related to self-reported attitudes: among participants who relied more on model-free learning, model-free social learning related more to post-task attitudes. We discuss implications for attitudes, trait impressions, and social behavior, as well as the role of habits in a memory systems model of social cognition.

Verbal instructions override the meaning of facial expressions

Psychological research has long acknowledged that facial expressions can implicitly trigger affective psychophysiological responses. However, whether verbal information can alter the meaning of facial emotions and corresponding response patterns has not been tested. This study examined emotional facial expressions as cues for instructed threat-of-shock or safety, with a focus on defensive responding. In addition, reversal instructions were introduced to test the impact of explicit safety instructions on fear extinction. Forty participants were instructed that they would receive unpleasant electric shocks, for instance, when viewing happy but not angry faces. In a second block, instructions were reversed (e.g., now angry faces cued shock). Happy, neutral, and angry faces were repeatedly presented, and auditory startle probes were delivered in half of the trials. The defensive startle reflex was potentiated for threat compared to safety cues. Importantly, this effect occurred regardless of whether threat was cued by happy or angry expressions. Although the typical pattern of response habituation was observed, defense activation to newly instructed threat cues remained significantly enhanced in the second part of the experiment, and it was more pronounced in more socially anxious participants. Thus, anxious individuals did not exhibit more pronounced defense activation compared to less anxious participants, but their defense activation was more persistent.