Institute of Psychology
Institute of Psychology
New publication in "PLoS Biology"
20 June 2024, by Ugur Turhan
Sebastian Gluth, Sophie Bavard and Erik Stuchlý published the article "Humans can infer social preferences from decision speed alone" in "PLoS Biology".
How do we know what someone’s social preferences or beliefs are when they are so often hidden and unspoken? While most observational learning literature focuses on the outcome of others' decisions to answer this question, this study focuses on the time it takes to make the decision. We show that, in a situation where people could only observe decision times and not choices, they were able to learn others' preferences and predict their future decisions accurately. By incorporating decision times into models of how people learn from each other, we can make more accurate predictions of human behavior, as decision times provide a continuous measure that reveals the strength of these preferences, offering a more detailed perspective.