UCLA

Human beings are inextricably linked to others. The ties we share with other people throughout the lifespan are a fundamental aspect of our existence. It follows that any decision we make as individuals has the potential to affect others, including those closest to us. This notion that our decisions frequently have consequences for others has fascinated psychologists for decades. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the psychological community on the subject of social decision-making, defined as decisions that have some kind of implicit or explicit social consequence. This surge has carried with it an unprecedented understanding of social decision-making behaviors, yet social decision-making studies are frequently constrained by a lack of ecological validity, specifically in terms of social decision partners (e.g., pairing participants with strangers, confederates, or fictive individuals). Doing so means that much of the literature may not be applicable to the most frequent and impactful decisions humans make: those involving close others. I aimed to help resolve these limitations in this dissertation. Across three studies I examined social decision preferences between parents and friends, two developmentally important relationships, at the behavioral, neural, and cognitive levels. Study 1 shows that, overall, adolescents appear to exhibit a distinct preference towards parents over friends when making social decisions involving conflicting outcomes for these two close others. Study 2 expands this work by showing that value-based neural representations of these close others is associated with behavioral preference; Study 3 continues this conceptual line of work by broadening the scope to show that value-based cognitive representations—derived from naturalistic text data—are also linked to behavioral social decision preferences. The contributions of this work towards broader theories of social decision-making, developmental science, and social neuroscience are discussed.