Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 13, 2025
06:41
Assessment of Social Interaction Behaviors
Published on: February 25, 2011
93.1K
Social exploration: How and why people seek new connections
Shelly Tsang1, Kyle Barrentine1, Sareena Chadha1
1Department of Psychology, University of Virginia.
Psychological Review
|September 12, 2024
Summary
Humans balance exploring new social connections with exploiting existing ones, a decision influenced by perceived rewards, costs, and environmental opportunities. Understanding this social exploration/exploitation trade-off is key to relationship choices and well-being.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Behavioral Economics
- Evolutionary Psychology
Background:
- Humans, like animals foraging for resources, seek social connections.
- A key decision involves balancing the exploration of new relationships with the exploitation of existing ones.
- This mirrors the exploration-exploitation trade-off found in optimal foraging theory and other disciplines.
Purpose of the Study:
- To apply optimal foraging theory principles to human social connection decisions.
- To define and explore the concept of social exploration/exploitation.
- To understand how social psychologists can better analyze relationship choices and their impact on health and well-being.
Main Methods:
- Synthesizing existing research on person- and situation-level predictors of social decision-making.
- Reframing these predictors within the framework of the exploration-exploitation trade-off.
- Applying principles from optimal foraging theory to social contexts.
Main Results:
- Social exploration and exploitation involve distinct costs and benefits.
- Individual and environmental factors influence the decision to explore or exploit social resources.
- Exploration is more likely when perceived as rewarding and less costly, with abundant opportunities.
Conclusions:
- The exploration-exploitation framework offers valuable insights into human social decision-making.
- Understanding this trade-off can illuminate the formation and maintenance of social relationships.
- Further research can generate hypotheses by applying optimal foraging theory to social dynamics and well-being.
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