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Cited by 118Neural and Behavioral Psychology StudiesDecision-Making and Behavioral EconomicsVisual perception and processing mechanisms

Social information is integrated into value and confidence judgments according to its reliability

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De Martino, Benedetto, Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian, Nouguchi, Takao, Sharot, Tali, Love, Bradley C.·2017·The Journal of Neuroscience
DOI 10.1523/jneurosci.3880-16.2017PMC PMC5481942
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Abstract

How much we like something, whether it be a bottle of wine or a new film, is affected by the opinions of others. However, the social information that we receive can be contradictory and vary in its reliability. Here, we tested whether the brain incorporates these statistics when judging value and confidence. Participants provided value judgments about consumer goods in the presence of online reviews. We found that participants updated their initial value and confidence judgments in a Bayesian fashion, taking into account both the uncertainty of their initial beliefs and the reliability of the social information. Activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex tracked the degree of belief update. Analogous to how lower-level perceptual information is integrated, we found that the human brain integrates social information according to its reliability when judging value and confidence. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The field of perceptual decision making has shown that the sensory system integrates different sources of information according to their respective reliability, as predicted by a Bayesian inference scheme. In this work, we hypothesized that a similar coding scheme is implemented by the human brain to process social signals and guide complex, value-based decisions. We provide experimental evidence that the human prefrontal cortex9s activity is consistent with a Bayesian computation that integrates social information that differs in reliability and that this integration affects the neural representation of value and confidence.

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  • Optimal integration of opinions should consider judgments, confidence, and average objective accuracy of agents.

    “Optimal integration of opinions, whether from human or artificial agents, should consider the following factors: their judgments, their confidence in the correctness of their opinions, and the average objective accuracy of the agents in similar situations in the past.”

    From Enhancing human-AI collaboration: The case of colonoscopy (2024) · cites this paper as [46]

    The Behavioral results and Discussion (pages not supplied) support integrating an initial judgment with others’ opinions, weighted by confidence in one’s own judgment and the reliability of the group information. They do not establish that integration should use each agent’s stated confidence or average objective accuracy in similar past situations; the study used the number of Amazon reviews as a measure of group reliability and did not study artificial agents. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
De Martino, B., Bobadilla-Suarez, S., Nouguchi, T., Sharot, T., & Love, B. C.
Affiliations
  • The Alan Turing Institute (GB)
  • University College London (GB)
ORCID
Venue
The Journal of Neuroscience
Publisher
Society for Neuroscience
Published
2017-05-31
Volume
37
Issue
25
Pages
6066-6074
ISSN
  • 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
  • 1529-2401
DOI
10.1523/jneurosci.3880-16.2017
PMC
PMC5481942
OpenAlex
W2618832075
Cited by
118
References
14
Citations by year
2026: 15 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 1
FWCI
4.44
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • Wellcome Trust (106931/Z/15/Z, 102612/A/13/Z)
  • Alan Turing Institute (TU/B/000086)
  • Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2014-075)
  • National Institutes of Health
  • Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P01HD080679)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
Keywords
social information, value judgments, confidence judgments, Bayesian inference, belief updating, reliability statistics, online reviews, consumer goods, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, perceptual decision making
MeSH terms
Adolescent, Adult, Bayes Theorem, Brain, Decision Making, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Judgment, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Mental Processes, Perception, Social Environment, Prefrontal Cortex, Internet, Uncertainty, Young Adult

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