Perceptual interventions ameliorate statistical discrimination in learning agents

Abstract

Choosing social partners is a potentially demanding task which involves paying attention to the right information while disregarding salient but possibly irrelevant features. The resultant trade-off between cost of evaluation and quality of decisions can lead to undesired bias. Information-processing abilities mediate this trade-off, where individuals with higher ability choose better partners leading to higher performance. By altering the salience of features, technology can modulate the effect of information-processing limits, potentially increasing or decreasing undesired biases. Here, we use game theory and multiagent reinforcement learning to investigate how undesired biases emerge, and how a technological layer (in the form of a perceptual intervention) between individuals and their environment can ameliorate such biases. Our results show that a perceptual intervention designed to increase the salience of outcome-relevant features can reduce bias in agents making partner choice decisions. Individuals learning with a perceptual intervention showed less bias due to decreased reliance on features that only spuriously correlate with behavior. Mechanistically, the perceptual intervention effectively increased the information-processing abilities of the individuals. Our results highlight the benefit of using multiagent reinforcement learning to model theoretically grounded social behaviors, particularly when real-world complexity prohibits fully analytical approaches.