Published in

Public Library of Science, PLoS Computational Biology, 10(11), p. e1004371, 2015

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004371

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A Common Mechanism Underlying Food Choice and Social Decisions

Journal article published in 2015 by Ian Krajbich, Todd Hare, Björn Bartling, Yosuke Morishima ORCID, Ernst Fehr
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

People make numerous decisions every day including perceptual decisions such as walking through a crowd, decisions over primary rewards such as what to eat, and social decisions that require balancing own and others’ benefits. The unifying principles behind choices in various domains are, however, still not well understood. Mathematical models that describe choice behavior in specific contexts have provided important insights into the computations that may underlie decision making in the brain. However, a critical and largely unanswered question is whether these models generalize from one choice context to another. Here we show that a model adapted from the perceptual decision-making domain and estimated on choices over food rewards accurately predicts choices and reaction times in four independent sets of subjects making social decisions. The robustness of the model across domains provides behavioral evidence for a common decision-making process in perceptual, primary reward, and social decision making.