Learning and Information Use in an Intergroup Context

When faced with uncertainty, human observers maximize performance by effectively integrating sensory information with learned task-relevant regularities. Does this behavior similarly occur in social, intergroup settings? Here, by providing participants with repeated exposure to a probabilistic decision-making task involving social information, we characterized their ability to learn task-relevant regularities and explored how social information interacted with learning over time. In particular, we examined how a behavior typically attributed to implicit intergroup bias––taking group membership into account when irrelevant or inappropriate––might be influenced by learning mechanisms that promote efficacy in the face of uncertainty. Across two experiments we show that observers learned and utilized task-relevant regularities to inform their decisions and maximize rewards. Notably, social information was utilized only when doing so conferred reward gains. Furthermore, learning about the utility of social information had a long-term influence on observers’ ability to subsequently learn and utilize other sources of information. Taken together, our findings highlight the powerful influence of learning in intergroup contexts: human observers are sensitive to–and quickly learn–the task-relevance of social information, and are able to use this learned knowledge to flexibly reweight available sources of information.