Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research using attention-monitoring techniques and fMRI has revealed that a shared neurocognitive mechanismunderlies both social decision making concerning the welfare of others and purely economic decision making for oneself.Such commonalities have been demonstrated mainly in isolated contexts, and it remains to be seen whether they extendto settings involving interactions with fellow decision makers. Using a behavioral study of distributive choices for othersand gambling decisions for self, we investigated how self-censorship in social contexts may mitigate the cognitive com-monalities demonstrated in isolated contexts. Results showed that, in both tasks, individual participants took more timeto respond when they expected subsequent discussion with another participant about reaching a consensus. In addition,we found a cognitive pattern unique to distributive choices for others only: participants expecting social interaction madetheir distributive choices in a more cognitively consistent manner, aligning with a rationale that they thought would bedefensible in subsequent discussion. No such systematic pattern was observed in gambling choices for self. These resultsindicate that anticipation of subsequent social interaction triggers self-censoring processes for some (but not all) tasks,whereby participants pre-edit their individual decisions systematically to prepare for social interaction.