A New Scale to Measure Preferences for Social Exploration and Exploitation

Just as animals forage for food, humans forage for social connections. People often face a decision between exploring new relationships and deepening existing ones. This tradeoff, known in optimal foraging theory as the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, is featured prominently in other disciplines such as animal foraging. Many of the framework’s principles can be applied to humans’ choices about their social resources, which we call social exploration/exploitation. Previously, I applied optimal foraging theory to theorize about how people search for connections (Tsang et al., 2024). In this dissertation, I present a scale that can be used to assess desires for exploration and exploitation. Across 4 studies (n = 1,439), I develop and validate a scale, examine how it relates to existing personality constructs and social network structures, and determine how it predicts well-being measures. I found that social exploration was positively associated with extraversion and larger network size, while social exploitation was negatively associated with extraversion. I also found that higher scores on both predict better social life satisfaction and less loneliness. I discuss several avenues of further research, such as investigating contextual factors that affect social exploration and exploitation and origins of these individual tendencies.