Tsang Shelly, Barrentine Kyle, Chadha Sareena, Oishi Shigehiro, Wood Adrienne
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
Psychol Rev. 2025 Apr;132(3):656-679. doi: 10.1037/rev0000499. Epub 2024 Sep 12.
Just as animals forage for food, humans forage for social connections. People often face a decision between exploring new relationships versus deepening existing ones. This trade-off, known in optimal foraging theory as the , is featured prominently in other disciplines such as animal foraging, learning, and organizational behavior. Many of the framework's principles can be applied to humans' choices about their social resources, which we call . Using known principles in the domain of social exploration/exploitation can help social psychologists better understand how and why people choose their relationships, which ultimately affect their health and well-being. In this article, we discuss the costs and benefits of social exploration and social exploitation. We then synthesize known person- and situation-level predictors of social decision making, reframing them in the language of the explore-exploit trade-off. We propose that people explore more when they find it more rewarding and less costly, and when the environment has many opportunities to do so. We conclude by discussing hypotheses generated by applying optimal foraging theory to social decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
正如动物觅食一样，人类也在寻求社会关系。人们常常面临探索新关系与深化现有关系之间的抉择。这种权衡，在最优觅食理论中被称为 ，在动物觅食、学习和组织行为等其他学科中也很突出。该框架的许多原则都可以应用于人类对其社会资源的选择，我们将其称为 。运用社会探索/利用领域的已知原则，有助于社会心理学家更好地理解人们如何以及为何选择他们的关系，而这最终会影响他们的健康和幸福。在本文中，我们讨论了社会探索和社会利用的成本与收益。然后，我们综合了已知的个人和情境层面的社会决策预测因素，用探索-利用权衡的语言对它们进行重新表述。我们提出，当人们发现探索更有回报且成本更低，以及环境中有很多这样做的机会时，他们会更多地进行探索。我们通过讨论将最优觅食理论应用于社会决策所产生的假设来结束本文。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
