Who you know is what you know: Modeling boundedly rational social sampling

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Decision Making

Background:

• The social environment serves as a crucial source for understanding the wider world, including preferences, risks, and behaviors.
• Inferences about the world are often made by sampling instances from this social environment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and test the social-circle model, a probabilistic account of how individuals infer relative event frequencies from social sampling.
• To investigate the structured and limited nature of cognitive search within the social environment.
• To examine individual differences in social sampling processes and their impact on inference accuracy.

Main Methods:

• Development of the social-circle model, integrating principles of bounded rationality and social memory.
• Application of a hierarchical Bayesian latent-mixture approach for rigorous model comparison.
• Empirical testing across multiple studies, including reanalysis of published data and new data from adults and children.

Main Results:

• The social-circle model significantly outperformed models assuming exhaustive search or no individual differences in search strategies.
• Findings were robust across different domains and age groups, indicating similar social sampling principles in children and adults.
• Model and parameter recovery analyses confirmed the social-circle model's ability to capture underlying cognitive processes in social sampling.

Conclusions:

• Social sampling, the process of making inferences from the social environment, is characterized by bounded rationality in both children and adults.
• Individuals employ structured and limited search strategies when sampling social information to make inferences about event frequencies.
• The social-circle model provides a robust framework for understanding individual differences and cognitive mechanisms in social inference.