Coming to a Consensus During Risky Decision-Making

Relationships are all about compromise. From deciding on where to eat dinner with a friend to negotiating chore lists at home, we often experience situations that require some flexibility. But what happens when we must work with others—especially people we don't know—to make a risky decision? That's what Caltech's Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience, and members of his lab set out to explore in a recent study.

"We found that most people compromise, settling on something between their two preferences," says Ketika Garg, a postdoctoral scholar research associate in the Mobbs lab. "But we also found that when outcomes are shared, people are biased in how they divvy up responsibility."

According to the researchers, people who claim more credit for successes and deflect blame for failures also compromise less with their partners, which might sound familiar to anyone who has been randomly paired for a joint task at school or work. A paper outlining the team's findings was published on June 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Research by Mobbs and his lab often explores risk-and-reward trade-offs, so he, Garg, and graduate student Wenning Deng initially aimed to investigate what happens when people must make risky decisions in collaboration with others who may not have the same risk preferences and how people navigate that tension.

Previous studies have shown that people tend to arrive at a consensus together and their risk preferences can be shaped by the social context, says Garg, who is a co-senior author on the PNAS paper, along with Mobbs. "Now, we show how people compromise in a joint real-time task by treating it as a dynamic process," she explains. "There's a tendency to cooperate, but the idea of compromise is not studied as much; that is a new angle we present with this work."

Read more on the Caltech website.