Fig. 4: Results of Study 3 (n = 47 in advantageous condition and n = 48 in disadvantageous condition).

A Learning curve. B, C Overall rewardingness of actions and action entropy averaged within the advantageous and disadvantageous conditions. Replicating Study 1 and Study 2, people learned worse under disadvantageous inequity. D, E The trial-by-trial model comparisons. The SPRL model significantly outperformed the models without considering social perception ratings, confirming the elevated effect of social perception in Study 3. Moreover, the effect is also stronger under the disadvantageous condition. F, G Fitted learning rate of the baseline model and effects of social perception of the SPRL model: replicating Studies 1 and 2, the learning rate was lower under disadvantageous inequity. However, we saw a significant positive effect of both perceived warmth and perceived competence in the disadvantageous condition, suggesting that the effect of social perception is enhanced under a smaller cognitive load during learning. Each dot represents a point estimate for one subject obtained as the mean of the posterior distribution of the parameters. All error bars reflect the s.e.m.