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

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.