Social preferences and social decision-making
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Our decisions do not occur in a social vacuum. Instead, we often have to decide whether to help, harm, or learn from the consequences of our actions when they affect other people. Neuroeconomists have long highlighted how social preferences for fairness, trust and altruism fundamentally shape how we interact with others (Fehr & Camerer, 2007). These preferences are exhibited when people make choices that result in a conflict between self and other preferences. More recently, researchers have extended these concepts to situations that are not financially costly for oneself to probe altruistic behaviours where they are perhaps purely other-regarding (Lockwood, Apps & Chang, 2020). This section considers several factors that influence social preferences and social decision-making in humans and in other animals. It considers helping or prosocial behaviours before revealing some of the influence and neural circuitry that underpins when we need to interact with another person strategically. The section then probes how other people’s choices may, in fact, influence our own, before ending with an overview of how frameworks from ethology can provide new approaches to integrate findings from human and non-human animal research.
