Social exploration: How and why people seek new connections.

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 , is featured prominently in other disciplines such as animal foraging, learning, and organizational behavior.

People constrain their semantic associations when talking to both friends and strangers.

During conversations, people face a trade-off between establishing understanding and making interesting and unique contributions. How do people balance this when deciding which concepts to reference, and does it matter how well they know their conversation partner? In the present work, participants made stream-of-consciousness word associations either with a partner or alone-simplified versions of dialogue and monologue. Participants made semantically narrower and more predictable word associations with a stranger than alone (Study 1), suggesting that they constrain their associations to establish mutual understanding.

The value of mere completion.

The positivity of goal completion is reinforced through everyday experiences of social praise and instrumental reward. Here we investigated whether, in line with this self-regulatory emphasis, people value completion opportunities in and of themselves. Across six experiments we found that adding an arbitrary completion opportunity to a lower-reward task increased the likelihood that participants would choose to work on that task over a higher-reward alternative that did not offer a completion opportunity.