Social Influence on Exploration/ Exploitation Strategies in Bandit Tasks, Experiment 2

Recent studies indicate that participants copy the choices of others in exploration/ exploitation environments. However, so far it has not been investigated whether an influencer’s exploration strategy (information seeking vs. exploitative) has an impact on the target’s exploration strategy beyond simple copying of choices. To investigate this question, participants play a nine-armed restless bandit task. The participant’s strategies are disentangled using a Kalman learning model accounting for exploration and copying.