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 exploration-exploitation trade-off, 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 social exploration/exploitation. 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) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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社会探索：人们如何以及为何寻求新的联系。


正如动物寻找食物一样，人类寻找社会联系。人们经常面临探索新关系和深化现有关系之间的决定。这种权衡在最佳觅食理论中被称为探索-利用权衡，在动物觅食、学习和组织行为等其他学科中具有突出的特征。该框架的许多原则可以应用于人类对其社会资源的选择，我们称之为社会探索/利用。在社会探索/利用领域使用已知的原则可以帮助社会心理学家更好地理解人们如何以及为什么选择他们的关系，这最终会影响他们的健康和福祉。在本文中，我们讨论社会探索和社会剥削的成本和收益。然后，我们综合已知的个人和情境层面的社会决策预测因素，并用探索-利用权衡的语言重新构建它们。我们建议，当人们发现探索更有价值、成本更低，并且环境有很多这样做的机会时，他们就应该进行更多的探索。最后，我们讨论了将最佳觅食理论应用于社会决策所产生的假设。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。