Social threat learning transfers to decision making in humans

= 120), we examined the effect of indirect experiences on behaviors by establishing a link between social threat learning and instrumental decision making. We contrasted learning from direct experience (i.e., Pavlovian conditioning) (experiment 1) against two common forms of social threat learning-social observation (experiment 2) and verbal instruction (experiment 3)-and how this learning transferred to subsequent instrumental decision making using behavioral experiments and computational modeling. We found that both types of social threat learning transfer to decision making in a strong and surprisingly inflexible manner. Notably, computational modeling indicated that the transfer of observational and instructed threat learning involved different computational mechanisms. Our results demonstrate the strong influence of others' expressions of fear on one's own decisions and have important implications for understanding both healthy and pathological human behaviors resulting from the indirect exposure to threatening events.