title: A Common Mechanism Underlying Food Choice and Social Decisions.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America; Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America.
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Krajbich
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Todd
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hare
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Björn
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bartling
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Translational Research Center, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland; Japan Science and Technology Agency, PRESTO, Saitama, Japan.
authors.forename: Yosuke
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Morishima
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Ernst
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fehr
mesh_terms: D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D005518:Food Preferences / Q000502:physiology*; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D012919:Social Behavior