The Paradox of Help Seeking in the Entropy Mastermind Game

Abstract

Research on Bayesian reasoning suggests that humans make good use of available information. Similarly, research on human information acquisition suggests that Optimal Experimental Design models predict human queries well. This perspective contrasts starkly with educational research on help seeking, which suggests that many students wait excessively long to ask for help, or even decline help when it is offered. We bring these lines of work together, exploring when people seek help as a function of problem state in the Entropy Mastermind code breaking game. The Entropy Mastermind game is a probabilistic version of the classic code breaking game, involving inductive, deductive and scientific reasoning. Whether help in the form of a hint was available was manipulated within subjects. Results showed that participants tended to ask for help late in the game play, often when they already had all the necessary information needed to crack the code. These results pose a challenge for some versions of Bayesian and Optimal Experimental Design frameworks. Possible theoretical frameworks to understand the results, including from computer science approaches to the Mastermind game, are considered.

Is it Just a Game? Development and Validation of a Deductive Version of Mastermind as a Measure of Reasoning Ability

“…In educational psychology, it has been proposed as an instructive game for school children to develop metacognitive skills, for example, to learn that trial-and-error is rarely a fruitful strategy (Bottino & Ott, 2006). The game has also been used to foster intuitions about probability and uncertainty in primary school children (Özel et al, 2021) or to study help-seeking behavior (Taylor et al, 2020). In cognitive psychology, Mastermind has been used as a paradigm for investigating human exploration behavior (Schulz et al, 2019) and for probing the cognitive processes of conditional reasoning (Best, 2001).…”