Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our actions shape what we learn. Because of this dependency,learners are proficient at choosing their actions to maximizetheir information gain. However, learning often unfolds insocial contexts where learners have both informational goals(e.g., to learn how something works) but also social goals (e.g.,to appear competent and impress others). How do these goalsshape learners’ decisions? Here, we present a computationalmodel that integrates the value of social and informationalgoals to predict the decisions that people will make in a simpleactive causal learning task. We show that, in a context wherethe informational and social goals are in conflict, an empha-sis on performance or self-presentation goals leads to reducedchances of learning (Exp. 1) and that social context can pushlearners to pursue performance-oriented actions even when thelearning goal is highlighted (Exp. 2). Our formal model ofsocial-active learning successfully captures the empirical re-sults. These findings are first steps towards understanding therole of social reasoning in active learning contexts.