Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In many daily life situations, people face decisions involving atrade-off between exploring new options and exploiting knownones. In these situations, observing the decisions of others caninfluence people’s decisions. Whereas social information oftenhelps making better decisions, research has suggested that undercertain conditions it can be detrimental. How precisely socialinformation influences decision strategies and impacts perfor-mance is, however, disputed. Here we study how social informa-tion influences individuals’ exploration-exploitation trade-offand show that this adaptation can undermine their performance.Using a minimal experimental paradigm, we find that partici-pants tend to copy the solution of other individuals too rapidly,thus decreasing the likelihood of discovering a better solution.Approximating this behavior with a simple model suggests, thatindividuals’ willingness to explore only depends on the value ofknown existing solutions. Our results allow for a better under-standing of the interplay between social and individual factorsin individual decision-making.