Abstract
This study investigated whether deciding to either stay with or leave a social relationship partner, based on a sequence of collaborative social interactions, is impacted by (1) observed and (2) anticipated gains and losses associated with the collaboration; and, importantly, (3) whether these effects differ between social and nonsocial contexts. In the social context, participants played an iterated collaborative economic game in which they were dependent on the successes and failures of a game partner in order to increase their monetary payoff, and in which they were free to stop collaborating with this partner whenever they chose. In Study 1, we manipulated the actual success rate of partners, and demonstrated that participants decided to stay longer with 'better' partners. In Study 2, we induced prior expectations about specific partners, while keeping the objective performance of all partners equal, and found that participants decided to stay longer with partners whom they expected to be 'better' than others, irrespective of actual performance. Importantly, both Study 1 and 2 included a nonsocial control condition that was probabilistically identical to the social conditions. All findings were replicated in nonsocial context, but results demonstrated that the effect of prior beliefs on stay/leave decision-making was much less pronounced in a social than a nonsocial context.
Highlights
People typically group together: they work together, become friends, join sports teams, and fall in love
Study 2 examines whether, and how, prior expectations about partnership returns impact stay/ leave decisions; and we explore how social versus nonsocial context impacts the effect of prior expectations on stay/leave decision making
Study 2 was conducted to investigate how the interplay between anticipated and observed gains and losses associated with a social collaboration would affect stay/leave decision-making. We compared these effects between social and nonsocial contexts to examine if expectations impact social and nonsocial partnerships to different extents
Summary
People typically group together: they work together, become friends, join sports teams, and fall in love. People are at some point faced with the decision to either maintain or terminate a social relationship. Deciding to stay with or leave a social partner is one of the more complex social decisions a person must make. Numerous aspects feed into the decision process [1], such as individual factors (e.g., personality traits), relationship factors (e.g., investment in, and satisfaction with, a partnership), or even external factors (e.g., the influence of social networks). The decision is often made in highly uncertain circumstances, as the decision-maker usually does not know the precise future consequences of staying or leaving. In general, people will be more likely to stay in relationships the more they get out of them; and as people cannot know what a relationship will yield in the future, we propose that people are more likely to stay in relationships the higher the expected value of the relationship is, to some extent irrespective of the actual gains and losses
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