Common thought patterns reflect generosity, fairness, and social context

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Humans frequently think about others, but how these thoughts align with social behavior and individual differences remains unclear.
• Understanding the link between ongoing cognition and social decision-making is crucial for explaining human behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if ongoing thoughts vary across social contexts and reflect individual social preferences like generosity and fairness.
• To explore the relationship between thought patterns, social context, and decision-making in altruism tasks.

Main Methods:

• Combined multidimensional experience sampling (MDES) with an online/in-person altruism task (N=320).
• Participants made monetary sharing decisions in contexts with varying partner cues (distressed, neutral, unidentifiable) while reporting thoughts via MDES.
• Principal component analysis was used to identify common thought patterns from MDES data.

Main Results:

• Identified robust, interpretable thought patterns characterizing cognition during social choice.
• Thought patterns systematically varied with social context, individual generosity, and fairness preferences.
• These cognitive patterns generalized to a non-social task, indicating they are not task-specific artifacts.

Conclusions:

• Ongoing thought states provide reliable insights into social preferences.
• This study introduces a novel framework for linking ongoing cognition with social behavior in diverse settings.
• Findings suggest that moment-to-moment cognition is a valuable window into social decision-making.