People often look to what most others are doing for guidance, yet the same majority can be informative in one setting and misleading in another. We examined how people interpret social frequency information when group membership and payoff alignment vary. In an incentivized experiment, demonstrators first learned through private feedback which option maximized their own payoff. Social learners received no outcome feedback and decided only after observing demonstrators' choices. This separation ensured that the social signal reflected demonstrators' private learning rather than mutual influence among simultaneously observing learners. We varied whether demonstrators were ingroup or outgroup members and whether their incentives were aligned or misaligned with the social learner's. The same majority could therefore point to the best option in one context and to the worst option in another. The design thus tested whether people interpreted the same signal differently across contexts. Performance was highest when demonstrators were aligned with the learner's incentives, especially when those demonstrators were also ingroup members, even though group membership was induced by minimal cues. Cognitive load reduced memory performance but did not measurably alter the use of social information. We repeated the design in Switzerland and Kenya to study how findings extend across distinct participant pools. Individual strategies were heterogeneous in both sites but more dispersed in Kenya. These findings show that people do not treat the same social frequency signal as interchangeable across contexts defined by group membership and incentive alignment, and they highlight the value of studying social learning across distinct participant pools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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