An Online Experimental Framework for Cooperative Relationships With a Real-Time Decision-Making and Rewarding Environment

Abstract

This paper investigates interactions between game theoretical strategies and social relationships in real-time decision-making and rewarding environments. We propose an experimental framework based on techniques of web-based multiplayer online games for this purpose. In our framework, multiple human players, represented as particles in a two-dimensional space of social interactions, can modify their positions and game strategies for the prisoner's dilemma in real time, and receive benefit or cost emerging from both game theoretical and social relationships with neighboring players. We report on experiments with human participants in different conditions of the payoff matrix, which reflects game structures, and the speed of each player, which reflects the ability to change her social relationship. We show that cooperative relationships emerge in real human groups regardless of experimental settings, and show their basic behavioral patterns. We further discuss relationships between behavioral characters of participants in the experiments and their psychological characters to see how their personalities can be reflected in their behavior in such a game theoretical framework, and show that a few psychological characters of participants might reflect their behavioral characters at least in part, but there were variations in these relationships between experimental groups.

A Large-Scale 3D Simulation of Continuous Social Dynamics using Social Particle Swarm Model on Parallel Architecture

“…They observed repeated occurrences of explosive dynamics that consisted of a formation of an altruistic cluster followed by its collapse with explosive dispersal of defective particles. The similar dynamics were observed both computationally and experimen-tally (see (Suzuki et al, 2018)). However, it is still not clear whether and how the significant increase in the scale of social networks, as discussed above, can bring about more diversity and demonstrate emerging patterns for higher-level interactions.…”

An Iot-Based Experimental Framework for Studying Continuous Social Dynamics in a Game-Theoretical and Face-to-Face Situation With Human Participants

“…The analyses identified weak correlations indicating that a high inclination to alter In order to conduct a comparative analysis between two distinct instances of communication, specifically one that takes place in a physical environment and the other in a virtual environment, we conducted a face-to-face experiment and a web-based experiment with the same five participants while keeping the same payoff matrix. The face-to-face experiment used the current proposed framework, and the web-based experiment used a framework developed by Suzuki et al (2018) based on the SPS model, which consists of human participants interacting with each other online through a computer.…”

“…Real-time decision making, well represented in the SPS model, has also received much attention in experimental studies with human participants (Friedman & Oprea, 2012;Hawkins & Goldstone, 2016;Janssen et al, 2014). Suzuki et al (2018) analyzed continuous social dynamics in real human groups by implementing a web-based multiplayer game based on the SPS model, in which human participants, represented as anonymous particles in a shared 2D space, can change their positions and gametheoretical strategies in real time according to the benefits or costs arising from social relationships with neighboring players. They found that the formation and collapse of cooperative clusters emerged in parallel.…”

“…In this paper, we conducted a series of three proof-of-concept experiments as follows: 1) A face-to-face social experiment with a small group of eight participants to demonstrate that our framework works by presenting data collection of social dynamics and initial findings from basic analysis. 2) An experimental analysis with both face-toface and web-based experiments with a unique population; to examine the effects of each platform on the evolution of social behavior within the same group, using the same combination of procedures as previous studies (Suzuki et al, 2018). 3) An extended face-to-face experiment with a larger group; to further explore the primary findings on emerging group dynamics in a larger group of 14 participants using an enhanced version of the framework, focusing particularly on the effects of the presence and absence of strategy information about other participants.…”