Linking compromise and responsibility attribution to risky decision-making in dyadic foraging

From hunting to financial planning, many decisions are made under risk and alongside social partners whose decisions and outcomes are coupled with our own. Joint decision-making can create challenges, such as navigating conflicting risk preferences, evaluating each other’s actions, and deciding whether to compromise. Yet when and why people compromise, how they evaluate each other’s responsibilities during joint decision-making, and the computational and psychological underpinnings of these processes remain unclear. We introduce a dyadic foraging paradigm designed to capture diverse risk preferences, where two participants jointly choose between locations that yield rewards but carry risks and evaluate each other’s responsibility for shared outcomes. Across two studies (exploratory N = 250, confirmatory N = 514), people tended to compromise rather than counteract their partner, especially under diverging risk preferences and when compromise was reciprocated. Computationally, compromise was explained by a reinforcement learning model showing that individuals integrate their preferences with that of their partner. Responsibility attributions exhibited egocentric biases—with participants claiming more credit for wins than blame for losses—and these biases were associated with individual differences in compromise behavior. The interplay between individual differences in risk and responsibility attribution further shaped coordination patterns. Finally, we show that compromising improved performance for risk-averse individuals, increased desirability as a social partner, and led to more favorable responsibility attributions, suggesting multiple benefits of compromising. By linking decisions about risk–reward trade-offs to metacognitive judgments about responsibility, our study reveals the social and cognitive processes underlying compromise in risky foraging and, more broadly, in collaborative contexts with conflicting preferences.