Effects of Social Strategies on the mechanisms of Simple Choices
Summary
Decision-making is part of our daily life in many ways. Depending on the situation, a decision-making process is affected by external factors such as the environment and participating individuals. In social dilemmas, group rationality and individual rationality impose tension against one another as rewards for one mean less or no reward for the other. As such, investigating how individuals are manipulated to perform certain strategies is important to understand. This understanding of cognitive mechanics can help support us better in the development of automated systems. We performed an experiment where we utilized the Prisoner’s Dilemma payoff matrix as a reward framework to determine what the effects of prior knowledge are during a 2-alternative forced choice social dilemma task on the response speed and bias on actions. We manipulated participants during the experiment by repeatedly informing them of the current standings after a set amount of trials, with the intent for individuals to change strategies based on what they are told. For the observed data, we have fitted a Drift-Diffusion model which tells us the effects of prior knowledge on effects in starting points or bias. The outcomes suggest that, although minimal, individuals are affected by the information they are given, as decision strategies start cooperative, but shift towards more defective choices as information is accumulated.