Utilizing social foraging as a framework to study decisions in groups

A central goal of the behavioral sciences is to understand how individuals decide between rewarding and conflicting options. Foraging theory, which is rooted in ecology and evolutionary theory, has helped advance this pursuit but has largely focused on individual decision-making processes. In this article, we extend beyond individual agents and propose social foraging as a promising avenue to study social decisions. We synthesize key socio-cognitive elements of social interactions that are particularly amenable to study through foraging paradigms, such as social inference, coordination, and collective behavior, especially in humans. We then propose a social foraging framework that distinguishes between the asocial and social components involved in the decision-making process and describes how the integration of these components drives decisions in social foraging. Our framework bridges research across disciplines to provide a promising new avenue for the study of social behavior by linking decisions across different scales, from individuals to collectives.