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Latent motives guide structure learning during adaptive social choice

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 404–414 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Predicting the behaviour of others is an essential part of social cognition. Despite its ubiquity, social prediction poses a poorly understood generalization problem: we cannot assume that others will repeat past behaviour in new settings or that their future actions are entirely unrelated to the past. We demonstrate that humans solve this challenge using a structure learning mechanism that uncovers other people’s latent, unobservable motives, such as greed and risk aversion. In four studies, participants (N = 501) predicted other players’ decisions across four economic games, each with different social tensions (for example, Prisoner’s Dilemma and Stag Hunt). Participants achieved accurate social prediction by learning the stable motivational structure underlying a player’s changing actions across games. This motive-based abstraction enabled participants to attend to information diagnostic of the player’s next move and disregard irrelevant contextual cues. Participants who successfully learned another’s motives were more strategic in a subsequent competitive interaction with that player in entirely new contexts, reflecting that social structure learning supports adaptive social behaviour.

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Fig. 1: The Social Prediction Game.
Fig. 2: Behavioural results.
Fig. 3: Computational models.
Fig. 4: Eye-tracking results from study 2.
Fig. 5: Task and results of Study 4.

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Data availability

The behavioural data analysed in this paper are available at https://github.com/jeroenvanbaar/NHB_motives_structure.

Code availability

The analysis code for this paper is available at https://github.com/jeroenvanbaar/NHB_motives_structure.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Sánchez for sharing experimental data from ref. 13. This work was funded by NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence grant no. P20GM103645 (to O.F.H). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Jeroen M. van Baar, Wenning Deng & Oriel FeldmanHall

  2. Trimbos Institute, Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Jeroen M. van Baar

  3. Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Matthew R. Nassar

  4. Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Matthew R. Nassar & Oriel FeldmanHall

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  1. Jeroen M. van Baar
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  2. Matthew R. Nassar
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Contributions

J.M.v.B. and O.F.H designed the research. J.M.v.B. and W.D. performed the research. J.M.v.B., M.R.N. and O.F.H analysed the data. J.M.v.B. and O.F.H wrote the paper. J.M.v.B., M.R.N. and O.F.H edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Oriel FeldmanHall.

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Peer review information Nature Human Behaviour thanks Björn Lindström, David Sander and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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van Baar, J.M., Nassar, M.R., Deng, W. et al. Latent motives guide structure learning during adaptive social choice. Nat Hum Behav 6, 404–414 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01207-4

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