A Common Mechanism Underlying Food Choice and Social Decisions

PLoS Comput Biol. 2015 Oct 13;11(10):e1004371. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004371. eCollection 2015 Oct.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Choice Behavior / physiology*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Decision Support Techniques*
  • Feeding Behavior / physiology
  • Food Preferences / physiology*
  • Game Theory*
  • Humans
  • Models, Biological*
  • Social Behavior*

Grants and funding

IK acknowledges support from FINRISK (http://www.nccr-finrisk.uzh.ch/index.php) and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (https://www.osc.edu) YM acknowledges support from JSPS and the Naito Foundation (https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/https://www.naito-f.or.jp/en/) EF gratefully acknowledges support from the European Research Council (grant number 295642, ‘Foundations of Economic Preferences’) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 100018_140734/1, ‘The distribution and determinants of social preferences’). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.