Study shows that opportunity costs influence when people leave social interactions

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

Researchers at University of Birmingham and University of Oxford recently carried out a study aimed at answering one of these questions, specifically: What dictates when humans decide to cease or leave a social interaction? Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that the choice of leaving interactions with other humans is typically influenced by social environment-based opportunity costs.

“We were really interested in the fact that research trying to understand how people think and act when we are interacting with someone else has rarely asked the question ‘When do you leave?,'” Matthew Apps, co-author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “We know lots about the psychology and brain processes that are going on when we are talking to someone or playing a game with them, but how do we choose to leave? For example, when you are chatting with a friend over coffee, when do you decide to make your apologies and leave to go meet another friend for a drink?”

People cannot always interact with others during the day; thus, deciding to leave social encounters and moving on to another activity is a crucial aspect of human experience. So far, however, psychology research has rarely investigated the principles influencing decisions to leave social interactions.

As part of their recent study, Apps and his colleagues set out to unveil some of these principles. Their work draws inspiration from previous research exploring how animals forage for food.

“When animals are foraging, they have to think about when they should 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,” Apps explained.

“Key for 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 are currently getting where they are. We call this the opportunity cost. So, when they aren’t getting many berries where they are, but many other berry bushes are full of fruit, they should leave.”

The researchers built on what is known about animal foraging strategies, specifically looking at whether the idea behind these strategies also guides how people decide to leave social interactions. In addition, they wished to determine whether people experiencing depression or loneliness choose to leave social encounters differently from others who are not currently having these experiences.

“Essentially, we wondered, do we leave sooner from the person we are currently interacting with if we know that there are lots of other valuable people we could meet?” Apps said. “Also, does this relate to our mental health, such 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, where players were asked to decide how to split pots of money among them. Essentially, players were asked to make several of these decisions consecutively.

Each player could decide whether to leave their partner and move on to another player at any time. When they did this, they had to wait a few seconds before connecting with a new player.

“Some of the other players were fairer than others, sharing more or less of the pots of money with others,” Apps explained. “We grouped these together, such that during blocks of five minutes you might get more of the fairer players or more of the less fair players. What this meant was that we manipulated the ‘opportunity cost’ in these different environments. When there were lots of fair players, you knew that leaving the player you were with would be more likely to lead to you connecting to a fair 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. In addition, they asked them to complete some questionnaires measuring some psychiatric symptoms and traits.

“It was really striking that across four experiments, we found people would leave less fair players quicker, which was fairly obvious, but would leave all players more quickly in blocks where more players were fair,” Apps said. “This supported our hypothesis that people think about leaving social interactions in a similar way to how animals forage for food. We leave sooner when we think the next person we might interact with might be fairer.”

Interestingly, the researchers also found that people who scored higher on depression and loneliness in their psychometric test made decisions about leaving social interactions differently. In fact, these players often left unfair players far more quickly, without considering what the next player might be like.

“Leaving unfair players quickly led to players interacting with more unfair people overall,” Apps said. “Overall, these findings suggest that good mental health might relate to how people decide when they end social interactions.”

The recent study by Apps and his collaborators gathered new interesting insight into how humans choose to cease a social interaction and move onto another. This insight could pave the way for new interesting studies further examining the connections between animal foraging strategies and human-human interactions.

“We hope to look more at how the brain makes these decisions; what 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 guide these decisions, are they similar to those that are involved in interacting with other people, or is it similar to those that help us make other types of decisions about leaving situations that aren’t social?”

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