# Information Prioritization Underpins the Flexible Expression of Social Preferences Under Time Constraints

## TL;DR

People adjust how they prioritize information when making social decisions based on their personal preferences and time pressure.

## Contribution

The study shows how individual social preferences interact with contextual incentives and time constraints to shape information prioritization and prosocial choices.

## Key findings

- People prioritize information aligned with their social preferences and contextual incentives under time pressure.
- This prioritization biases prosocial choices, making people more extreme in their selfish or prosocial behavior.
- Flexible information prioritization helps individuals balance personal preferences with external constraints.

## Abstract

While recent research shows how time constraints exacerbate the influence of contextual (dis)incentives on information prioritization and subsequent choice during prosocial decision-making, this emerging perspective is silent on how pervasive individual differences in dispositional social preferences might interact with these contextual factors to shape these processes. To bridge this gap, we demonstrated in a preregistered study (N = 200 adults from the United States and Canada; Prolific Academic) that people calibrate their information priorities based on both their dispositional social preferences and contextual (dis)incentives, and that time constraints further exacerbated information prioritization that aligned with their own social preferences, in addition to information incentivized by the broader social context. Furthermore, these information priorities subsequently biased prosocial choices, extremifying people’s selfish/prosocial choice patterns under time constraints. These findings suggest that flexible information prioritization underpins people’s capacity to navigate different social interactions while balancing their own preferences against external incentives and constraints.