Selective Attention Can Bias Prosocial Learning From Consequences

Previous research found that people's decision-making is shaped by learning from the consequences of past decisions. We hypothesized that the decision strategy people learn depends on which of the consequences of their previous decisions they pay attention to. We ran a series of pre-registered experiments to test whether manipulating people's attention could be an effective strategy for fostering prosocial learning from the consequences of prior decisions in a social dilemma. Our findings show that when people attend to how a previous decision affected distant others, they learn to make subsequent decisions in a way that is less parochial. Conversely, making people pay attention to how their decisions affected a close ingroup can spur an ingroup bias. As a result, we demonstrated that the prosocial lessons that people learn depend on which outcomes they attend to.