Complex decision-making is facilitated by social modulation

FRANCO AGUSTÍN BERNAL; TOMÁS ALVES SALGUEIRO; AXEL BRZOSTOWSKI; AYELÉN CARAMÉS; EMILIO RECART; DAMIÁN FURMAN; JUAN MANUEL PÉREZ; PABLO NICOLÁS FERNÁNDEZ LARROSA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; SAN XXXVI ANNUAL (VIRTUAL) MEETING; 2021

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

Some decision-making (DM) processes require quick answers, while more complex decisionsdemand greater cognitive engagement. Under the hypothesis that frequent exposure to a stimulus or association with an emotional valence could drive DM, online experiments were conducted and results were compared with a more ?ecological? situation (Social Study) involving: 1. online surveys conducted during the 2019 Argentine Presidential Elections; 2. a dataset of written media news to assess each candidate?s mention frequency and sentimental analysis. Cognitive experiments involved a computer task where participants choose a face from 4 options, each of them associated with different frequencies (EXP#1) or with positive, negative, neutral, or mixed sentences (EXP#2). Two experimental groups were set up: the 1st was asked tochoose a face without any specification (NST); and the second group was asked to choose a person to perform an important task (IT). Results show: 1. The most repeated face was significantly more chosen in the NST group, involving significantly greater response time; 2. The faces with a positive association were significantly more chosen than others, in both groups; and 3. The effect persisted at least for 24hs. The social study supported our experimental results as Familiarity (F) and Trust (T) mostly explain the Voting Probability (VP), as well as F, T, and VP for each candidate correlate significantly with the frequency of mentions, the positive association, and election results. These results support our hypothesis and suggest that complex decision-making susceptibilityto social modulation could depend on the relevance of the involved task. Keywords: Complex Decision-Making; Priming; Presidential Elections.