Blame and Compromise During Risky Dyadic Foraging

Foraging requires balancing risks, rewards, and learning from outcomes. Social foraging poses additional challenges: evaluating others' actions and adjusting preferences to achieve compromise. Yet ‘when’ and ‘why’ people compromise, and its computational and psychological underpinnings, remain poorly understood. We asked how individuals jointly balance risk-reward tradeoffs while navigating differing risk preferences during foraging and evaluate each other's contributions to shared outcomes. We introduce a novel dyadic foraging paradigm to capture naturalistic differences in risk preference and compromise: pairs jointly chose between locations that yield rewards but carry risks. Across two preregistered studies (exploratory N = 250, confirmatory N = 514), people tended to compromise rather than counteract, with the degree of compromise depending on risk differences between partners and whether compromise was reciprocated. Computational modeling revealed how individuals integrate their own and their partner’s preferences when deciding to compromise. We found that responsibility attributions—credit and blame judgments after each trial—showed egocentric biases, with participants claiming more credit for wins than losses, and these metacognitive biases predicted individual differences in compromise behavior. We also show that the interplay of individual differences in risk and blame determines collective dyadic movement. Finally, we show that compromise improved performance for risk-averse individuals, reduced responsibility, and increased desirability as a social partner. By integrating decisions related to risk-reward trade-offs with metacognitive judgments about responsibility, our study offers a new perspective on the social motivations underlying collaboration during risky foraging behaviors.