Social Utility Modeling: A Tool to Gain Insight into Social Motives

Computational modeling is an emerging analysis technique with the potential to offer important insight into how researchers in the cognitive sciences approach important questions – particularly questions about how people make choices. However, for those researchers who are interested in utilizing computational models in their own research, learning the how’s and why’s of the approach can seem prohibitively difficult. In the current work, we address these concerns by, firstly, outlining the basic principles of computational modeling in plain and accessible language. We then propose criteria to consider when adopting a computational model to answer a research question, demonstrating that Social Utility Models have many applications in the field of social cognition and enjoy useful advantages over conventional analysis approaches. Finally, in a step-by-step tutorial, we explain how to implement a computational modeling analysis and demonstrate this approach by using an example dataset.