Model-Based and Model-Free Social Cognition: Investigating the Role of Habit in Social Attitude Formation and Choice

Abstract

Do habits play a role in our social impressions? To investigate the contribution of habits to the formation of social attitudes, we examined the roles of model-free and model-based reinforcement learning in social interactions – computations linked in past work to habit and planning, respectively. Participants in this study learned about novel individuals in a sequential reinforcement learning paradigm, choosing financial advisors who led them to high- or low-paying stocks. Results indicated that participants relied on both model-based and model-free learning, such that each type of learning was expressed in both advisor choices and post-task self-reported liking of advisors. Specifically, participants preferred advisors who could provide large future rewards as well as advisors who had provided them with large rewards in the past. Although participants relied more heavily on model-based learning overall, they varied in their use of model-based and model-free learning strategies, and this individual difference influenced the way in which learning related to self-reported attitudes: among participants who relied more on model-free learning, model-free social learning related more to post-task attitudes. We discuss implications for attitudes, trait impressions, and social behavior, as well as the role of habits in a memory systems model of social cognition.

The Social Neuroscience of Prejudice

“…Although social psychologists have long hypothesized a role for instrumental learning in attitudes and social behavior (e.g., Breckler, 1984), this idea has only recently been tested using contemporary reinforcement learning paradigms and computational modeling (Behrens et al, 2009;Hackel & Amodio, 2018). Behavioral studies confirm that people incrementally update their attitudes about both persons (Hackel et al, 2019) and groups (Kurdi et al, 2019) in a manner predicted by reinforcement models. Convergent fMRI research has linked this process to the striatum (Hackel et al, 2015).…”

“…Although social neuroscience has yet to investigate the role of habit in prejudice, behavioral research suggests that a habit-like process, such as model-free learning, can underlie social attitudes toward both persons and groups (Hackel et al, 2019;Kurdi et al, 2019). These findings suggest that habits may indeed play a role in prejudice.…”

Developmental asymmetries in learning to adjust to cooperative and uncooperative environments

“…Third, adjusting behaviour requires expectations to be updated in response to new information. Updating of expectations in social environments can be captured by reinforcement learning (RL) models (e.g., 32 – 34 ), in which learning is driven by differences between expected and received rewards (i.e., prediction errors). Adolescence is characterized by substantial improvements in flexible learning and quick adaptation to novel non-social contexts 35 – 37 ; whether this extends to the social domain, however, is still unclear (but see 38 ).…”

Editorial: On the Nature and Scope of Habits and Model-Free Control

“…Elsewhere in this Special Topic, researchers emphasize repeated learning of action-value associations (Hackel et al, 2019 ; Morris and Cushman, 2019 ). This is the “model-free” account of habit, which derives from the field of computational reinforcement learning (Sutton and Barto, 1998 ; Daw et al, 2005 ; Dolan and Dayan, 2013 ).…”