Social Learning

Value-based decision-making is a ubiquitous feature of everyday life. Extensive research illustrates that both humans and animals are highly adept at learning from reward and punishment contingencies under different conditions to reap adaptive outcomes. The result is a well-characterized cognitive map identifying and classifying the mechanisms underlying goal-directed learning and decision-making. Despite evidence that optimal choices are critically dependent on the actions of others, little is known about how such learning occurs within the social domain. Yet, humans live in large, complex societies that regularly demand engaging with people in interactions that are typically rewarding or punishing. Here, we marry classic theories of goal-oriented behavior within the fields of social psychology and economics (Bandura, Ajzen, etc.), with more recent work in cognitive neuroscience to argue that humans learn social value through domain general learning mechanisms. Much like the findings within nonsocial domain, we argue that social choices are likely shaped by a combination of action outcome and habitual systems. While many social choices clearly require a cognitive flexibility that stems from action–outcome learning systems (for instance, deciding whether to embezzle from your company), some types of social choices may be better characterized as habit-oriented, since they are less sensitive to reward devaluation (for instance, compliance with a specific subset of social norms). Drawing on recent work that has leveraged a cognitive learning framework to explore social decision-making, here we discuss how goal-directed choices likely operate within our social world.