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 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.