Abstract
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.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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 modelbased reinforcement learning in social interactions – computations linked in past work to habit and planning, respectively
Does habit play role a social impressions? Our findings demonstrate that, people form impressions through reward-based reinforcement processes that include model-free learning – a form of learning thought to contribute to habitual behavior
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. We befriend people who are kind, hire people who are competent, avoid those who are domineering, or seek counsel from those who are empathic In this way, impression formation often serves our goals (Brewer, 1988; Fiske and Neuberg, 1990; Bargh and Ferguson, 2000), as we use our knowledge of other people – their traits, mental states, and behaviors – to predict their actions and decide whether to interact with them (Heider, 1958; Tamir and Thornton, 2018). We asked whether habit-like processes may contribute to social cognition – how we learn about, interact with, and evaluate other people – and help explain social behaviors that appear to occur independently of, or in opposition to, one’s goals
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