Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When making decisions, humans often rely on information from their social networks through a process termed social sampling. Prior work suggests that when drawing social samples, people search through their contacts in a sequential manner based on structured social categories. We examined whether the problem domain impacts how one categorizes their social contacts and which social categories they sample from. In our study, participants answered questions about the relative popularity of national parks or social media platforms, respectively associated with offline activities and online activities. Participants then provided frequency information about the number of their contacts who have engaged in these activities. Adopting a hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach, we compared two social sampling models: one defining social groups based on closeness of social relations, and one defining social groups based on contact mode. Our findings suggest that people sample from different members of their social network depending on the type of decision they are making.