Research shows that opportunity costs influence when people leave social interactions

Psychology researchers and neuroscientists have been trying to understand the principles that govern social interactions for decades. Although their studies have yielded interesting results, many questions remain unexplored or unanswered.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford recently conducted a study aimed at answering one of these questions, specifically: What determines when people decide to drop or leave a social interaction? Their findings, published in Communication psychologysuggest that the choice to leave interactions with other people is typically influenced by opportunity costs associated with the social environment.

“We were very interested in the fact that research trying to understand how people think and act when we interact with another person has rarely asked the question, ‘When are you leaving?’,” said Matthew Apps, co-author of the article. Medical Xpress. “We know a lot about the psychology and brain processes that happen when we talk to someone or play a game with them, but how do we choose to leave? For example, if you are chatting with a friend over a cup of coffee, when do you you then decide to apologize and leave to meet another friend for drinks?”

People cannot always communicate with others during the day; Therefore, the decision to leave social encounters and move on to another activity is a crucial aspect of the human experience. However, to date, psychological research has rarely explored the principles that influence decisions to leave social interactions.

As part of their recent research, Apps and his colleagues wanted to reveal some of these principles. Their work is inspired by previous research into the way animals search for food.

“When animals are foraging, they have to think about when to leave the location where they are currently getting resources, such as in the berry bushes they are currently in, to travel somewhere else, such as another bush on the other side of the field,” explains Apps.

“The key to how animals make that choice is that they think about how much food they get on average from other locations, compared to how much they currently get where they are. We call this the opportunity cost. So if they don’t get that, a lot of berries where they are, but a lot of other berry bushes are full of fruit, they have to go.”

The researchers built on what is known about foraging strategies for animals, looking specifically at whether the idea behind these strategies also determines the way people decide to abandon social interactions. Additionally, they wanted to determine whether people who experience depression or loneliness choose to leave social encounters differently than others who are not currently having these experiences.

“Essentially, we asked ourselves: Are we more likely to leave the person we are currently interacting with if we know there are many other valuable people we can meet?” Apps said. “Does this also relate to our mental health, so that people who are more depressed or lonely make these decisions differently?”

To test their hypotheses, Apps and his colleagues designed a simple computer game, asking players to decide how to divide the pots of money among them. Essentially, the players were asked to make several of these decisions in succession.

Each player can decide at any time whether he wants to leave his partner and go to another player. When they did this, they had to wait a few seconds before connecting to a new player.

“Some other players were fairer than others and shared more or less of the money pots with others,” Apps explained. “We grouped these together so that during five-minute blocks you could get more of the more honest players or more of the less honest players. What this meant was that we were manipulating the ‘opportunity costs’ in these different environments. When there were a lot of honest players you knew that leaving the player you were with would likely lead to you connecting with an honest player.”

The researchers enrolled a total of 175 participants to take part in this computer game, recording their decisions and later analyzing them using mathematical models. They also asked them to complete a number of questionnaires that measured some psychiatric symptoms and characteristics.

“It was really striking that in four experiments we found that people were more likely to leave less honest players, which was pretty obvious, but they were more likely to leave all players in blocks where more players were honest,” Apps said. “This supported our hypothesis that people think about leaving social interactions in a similar way to how animals search for food. We are more likely to leave if we think the next person we come into contact with might be more honest.”

Interestingly, the researchers also found that people who scored higher on depression and loneliness in their psychometric test made decisions about otherwise leaving social interactions. In fact, these players often left dishonest players much faster, without thinking about what the next player might be like.

“Abandoning dishonest players quickly led to players hanging out with more dishonest people in general,” Apps said. “Overall, these findings suggest that good mental health may be related to how people decide when to end social interactions.”

The recent research from Apps and his collaborators has provided new interesting insight into how people choose to end one social interaction and move on to another. This insight could pave the way for new interesting studies that further explore the links between animal foraging strategies and human-human interactions.

“We hope to look more at how the brain makes these decisions; which parts of the brain help us think about the opportunity costs of staying in an interaction or deciding to leave?” Apps added. “What brain chemicals drive these decisions, are they similar to the chemicals involved in interacting with other people, or are they similar to the chemicals that help us make other types of decisions about leaving situations that are not social?”

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