Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When faced with uncertainty, human observers maximize performance by integrating sensory information with learned task-relevant regularities. Does this behavior similarly occur in social settings? In this paper, we explore how reward-seeking behavior in an intergroup context is affected by readily available but task-irrelevant social information (in the form of group membership) when task-relevant reward information can be learned over time. Across two experiments, we show that participants learned and utilized task-relevant regularities to inform their choices. We also show that human observers are not universally biased towards utilizing social information in all settings––participants learned to disregard social information when not relevant to the task at hand. However, learning about the utility of social information (Experiment 2) had a long-term influence on observers’ ability to subsequently learn and utilize available sources of information. Real-world intergroup contexts typically encompass situations and stimuli that have been previously experienced by the observer. Our findings highlight the powerful influence of learning in such contexts.