Sampling of Social Information: Decisions From Experience in Bargaining

Abstract

Whenever people depend on others, information about how those around them are likely to behave is important for the pursuit and achievement of goals.We investigated how the way such social information is learned, by description or experience, affects offers in a bargaining situation.Participants learned how often each offer had previously been accepted or rejected, either as probability information or by experiencing others' responses.When participants had to draw a representative sample of responses, the proportion of risky offers decreased under social experience, resulting in a gap to the description condition.When participants could terminate sampling whenever they wanted, however, no descriptionexperience gap was observed.The sampling pattern suggests that participants disregarded probability information and instead relied on the allocation as proxy for risk.Accordingly, a certain amount of social experience seems necessary to overwrite people's initial expectations and change their behavior.Under what conditions people search for social information is crucial for understanding how and when it impacts behavior.

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