Beyond the individual: A social foraging framework to study decisions in groups

A key goal of the behavioral sciences is to understand how agents decide between rewarding, hazardous, and conflicting options. Foraging theory, which is rooted in ecology and evolutionary theory, has helped advance this pursuit but has largely been limited to the study of the individual. In this Perspective, we extend beyond an individual. We propose social foraging as a promising avenue to study social decisions, or decisions within a social context. Recent research has already applied similar paradigms to study social behavior in naturalistic conditions. We synthesize the key socio-cognitive elements involved in social foraging that can be further studied through foraging paradigms. We then propose a social foraging framework that distinguishes between the asocial and social components involved in the decision-making process and describes their integration. 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.