4 ms·

Humans display a few consistent behavioral phenotypes in two player games (2016)

88 points by tjalfi 6y ago

tjalfi 6y ago
(submitter) The actual title is "Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games". I shortened it to fit and replaced dyadic with "two player".
- gnulinux 6y ago
  Tangential question: Not a native speaker but wouldn't "only a few" make more sense than "a few"? The paper title emphasizes the lack of great variety, as does "only a few", but without any more context "a few [...] phenotypes" could also mean "more phenotypes than anticipated"?
  - eximius 6y ago
    'a few' is fairly neutral to expectations and more speaks to the absolute number - of which 4 is 'a few'. If the author wanted to emphasize that this was fewer than expected, 'only a few' would have been appropriate - but this might not have been their intent.
  - tjalfi 6y ago
    (submitter) The title is quite close to the 80 character limit. I started with "only a few" but had to cut "only" after I replaced dyadic with two player. "dyadic" seemed too obscure to use in a HN title.
mxmilkiib 6y ago
"The requested page "content/2/8/e1600451" could not be found.", though google confirms the url. Edit: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02015 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02015 "Socially relevant situations that involve strategic interactions are widespread among animals and humans alike. To study these situations, theoretical and experimental works have adopted a game-theoretical perspective, which has allowed to obtain valuable insights about human behavior. However, most of the results reported so far have been obtained from a population perspective and considered one specific conflicting situation at a time. This makes it difficult to extract conclusions about the consistency of individuals' behavior when facing different situations, and more importantly, to define a comprehensive classification of the strategies underlying the observed behaviors. Here, we present the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in which subjects face four different dyadic games, with the aim of establishing general behavioral rules dictating individuals' actions. By analyzing our data with an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we find that all the subjects conform, with a large degree of consistency, to a limited number of behavioral phenotypes (Envious, Optimist, Pessimist, and Trustful), with only a small fraction of undefined subjects. We also discuss the possible connections to existing interpretations based on a priori theoretical approaches. Our findings provide a relevant contribution to the experimental and theoretical efforts towards the identification of basic behavioral phenotypes in a wider set of contexts without aprioristic assumptions regarding the rules or strategies behind actions. From this perspective, our work contributes to a fact-based approach to the study of human behavior in strategic situations, that could be applied to simulating societies, policy-making scenario building and even for a variety of business applications."
wanderer2323 6y ago
Phenotypes: Envious (30%) -- defeat opponent Pessimist (20%) -- maximize min payoff Optimist (20%) -- maximize max payoff Trustful (20%) -- cooperate Undefined (10%) -- everyone else, lump of players with no strategy to define them as a group
- WJW 6y ago
  I have observed that in family games of the board game "Acquire", I would typically play solidly and take very few risks while my father and brother would play solidly and take a lot of risks. (There was also my little sister who was a little too young to understand the game, she just didn't play very well at all) This led to me always getting second place and my father/brother trading first and third places among them. I never thought about it as maximizing max payoff vs maximizing min payoff but it makes a lot of sense. I also observe this behavior in other areas of our lives.
  - maininformer 6y ago
    Yo! Same! I started playing boardgames with my partner a 2 years ago. I was such a noob that I lost to everyone in every game. He is really good and after I learned all his tricks the only two that I think are remaining that makes me consistently second is a) more risk taking and b) being first player. Which makes sense the higher the risk the higher the reward; when he wins its by quite a bit and when he "loses" its either a couple of points behind me or ahead of me
Tepix 6y ago
Human behaviour is what makes the game agar.io so great. In this game i occasionally observed players cooperating very successfully in free-for-all mode. The challenge is to find another player to cooperate with by winning their trust. You can give each other energy which makes the other play grow (and yourself shrink). It gets super interesting once the power relationship changes in the game and the formerly weaker player can now kill the other player. Will he/she remain cooperative? Will you be backstabbed? A study in psychology and great fun.
- glitchc 6y ago
  Reading the fine print...$7.99 a week to play the game?!? Dear sir, you are a paid troll.
Iv 6y ago
Game designers have been using an empirical categorization of players behavior for ages: Hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades - Diamonds: achievers who collect all possible awards and treasures - Spades: explorers who travel the game world and try everything in it - Heart: people who engage in socialization - Clubs: people who engage in competition Note that these are more behaviors than phenotypes but most players have preferences among them.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  Here are the player categories that the developers of Magic The Gathering came up with https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type
  - Iv 6y ago
    Interesting. That's funny "Johnny/Jenny mostly describe "cheesers" in Starcraft
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      Johnny is the guy who comes up with his own build orders and refuses to play anything 'standard' (including cheeses). Some of the builds can turn into popular cheese, but the majority cheesers on the ladder are more like Spike. Florencio is probably the highest profile example.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Wow, that has become complicated over the years. I like it, though, as a Johnny... It was interesting to see FFG’s Netrunner designed to explicitly have appealing cards for each of these three archetypes, as opposed to MTG where they emerged over time before the designers started to keep them in mind.
- meshenna 6y ago
  How have I not heard of this? Thanks for the pointer. I went a-googling and found Richard Bartle's paper. [0] [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247190693_Hearts_clubs_diamonds_spades_Players_who_suit_MUDs https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247190693_Hearts_cl...
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
Things described as “game theory rational” often become irrational as soon as you introduce an error term with respect to the rules of the game. An example is the famous marshmallow experiment. It’s framed as a test of self-control and rationality, but what if the proctor is lying to you? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  General distrust of all predictions about the future is more or less exactly what they claimed that the experiment was measuring.
  - BobbyJo 6y ago
    That's interesting to learn, and makes sense. The ability to delay gratification is both an input for behavior, and an output from other personality traits. Subconsciously, I think I've always had this framework that the traits that influence our behavior were somehow separable or independent, which I guess isn't necessarily true. Personality traits I guess can be looked at as kind of an N-body problem, with every trait influencing every other. The output behavior is fed back into the system, and can then be looked at as kind of a force carrier. On the outside we think of there being N independent bodies, but as far as the real influence is concerned, they are really overlapping fields with no well-defined boundaries.
plumsempy 6y ago
Tangential. Games with good stories and gameplay are the same to me as novels, if not better. In that they allow me to experience things otherwise not possible. Like running for dear life when Dhaka is chasing you in Prince of Persia; or decimating a whole village in Skyrim and having that dark big hole in your chest for what you did carry on until you load the game again. But the most recent learning from myself has been from Divinity 2 Original Sin. Great game. There you have a main avatar and 3 other players, equally qualified in every sense, and you control all 4. The only difference between the avatar and the rest is one's identity tied to the avatar. At some point I realized my ranger and melee are pretty strong while wearing nothing but tattered loin clothes; while my avatar, a jack of everything cool and carrier of all the gear he could not even wear sucked. This was an epiphany for me in team spirit. I was hoarding everything cool for my avatar. This had 2 effects. Firstly, it starved the rest of the team from getting good, relevant gear. Secondly, the rest remained laser focused on a couple of skill trees while my avatar, or "I", was hoarding all the cool skills wanting to become a god of all the things or something. So I gave away some epic gear to my ranger and melee units and they got buffed a lot. And I also trimmed the avatar into a single well defined role (pyro summoner) and now I have a pretty strong team. I am pretty sure this pattern would have had a longer lasting effect on my personal and professional development as well, had I not felt it on my skin like that. Everyone knows you're supposed to share or not to be greedy but I wonder for how many that has been a matter of "life and death".
- diplodocusaur 6y ago
  Similar experience on an unrelated online game. There's just so much leveling up a single unit can do (caveat: depends on context). It sounds related to comparative advantage and synergy concepts. Games keep tending to be dismissed as mere entertainment, but there is a lot of value to be had by seriously thinking about them because they are toy models.

88 points by tjalfi 6y ago

(submitter) The actual title is "Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games". I shortened it to fit and replaced dyadic with "two player".

gnulinux 6y ago
Tangential question: Not a native speaker but wouldn't "only a few" make more sense than "a few"? The paper title emphasizes the lack of great variety, as does "only a few", but without any more context "a few [...] phenotypes" could also mean "more phenotypes than anticipated"?
- eximius 6y ago
  'a few' is fairly neutral to expectations and more speaks to the absolute number - of which 4 is 'a few'. If the author wanted to emphasize that this was fewer than expected, 'only a few' would have been appropriate - but this might not have been their intent.
- tjalfi 6y ago
  (submitter) The title is quite close to the 80 character limit. I started with "only a few" but had to cut "only" after I replaced dyadic with two player. "dyadic" seemed too obscure to use in a HN title.

mxmilkiib 6y ago

"The requested page "content/2/8/e1600451" could not be found.", though google confirms the url. Edit: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02015 https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02015 "Socially relevant situations that involve strategic interactions are widespread among animals and humans alike. To study these situations, theoretical and experimental works have adopted a game-theoretical perspective, which has allowed to obtain valuable insights about human behavior. However, most of the results reported so far have been obtained from a population perspective and considered one specific conflicting situation at a time. This makes it difficult to extract conclusions about the consistency of individuals' behavior when facing different situations, and more importantly, to define a comprehensive classification of the strategies underlying the observed behaviors. Here, we present the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in which subjects face four different dyadic games, with the aim of establishing general behavioral rules dictating individuals' actions. By analyzing our data with an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we find that all the subjects conform, with a large degree of consistency, to a limited number of behavioral phenotypes (Envious, Optimist, Pessimist, and Trustful), with only a small fraction of undefined subjects. We also discuss the possible connections to existing interpretations based on a priori theoretical approaches. Our findings provide a relevant contribution to the experimental and theoretical efforts towards the identification of basic behavioral phenotypes in a wider set of contexts without aprioristic assumptions regarding the rules or strategies behind actions. From this perspective, our work contributes to a fact-based approach to the study of human behavior in strategic situations, that could be applied to simulating societies, policy-making scenario building and even for a variety of business applications."

wanderer2323 6y ago

Phenotypes: Envious (30%) -- defeat opponent Pessimist (20%) -- maximize min payoff Optimist (20%) -- maximize max payoff Trustful (20%) -- cooperate Undefined (10%) -- everyone else, lump of players with no strategy to define them as a group

WJW 6y ago
I have observed that in family games of the board game "Acquire", I would typically play solidly and take very few risks while my father and brother would play solidly and take a lot of risks. (There was also my little sister who was a little too young to understand the game, she just didn't play very well at all) This led to me always getting second place and my father/brother trading first and third places among them. I never thought about it as maximizing max payoff vs maximizing min payoff but it makes a lot of sense. I also observe this behavior in other areas of our lives.
- maininformer 6y ago
  Yo! Same! I started playing boardgames with my partner a 2 years ago. I was such a noob that I lost to everyone in every game. He is really good and after I learned all his tricks the only two that I think are remaining that makes me consistently second is a) more risk taking and b) being first player. Which makes sense the higher the risk the higher the reward; when he wins its by quite a bit and when he "loses" its either a couple of points behind me or ahead of me

Tepix 6y ago

Human behaviour is what makes the game agar.io so great. In this game i occasionally observed players cooperating very successfully in free-for-all mode. The challenge is to find another player to cooperate with by winning their trust. You can give each other energy which makes the other play grow (and yourself shrink). It gets super interesting once the power relationship changes in the game and the formerly weaker player can now kill the other player. Will he/she remain cooperative? Will you be backstabbed? A study in psychology and great fun.

glitchc 6y ago
Reading the fine print...$7.99 a week to play the game?!? Dear sir, you are a paid troll.

Iv 6y ago

Game designers have been using an empirical categorization of players behavior for ages: Hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades - Diamonds: achievers who collect all possible awards and treasures - Spades: explorers who travel the game world and try everything in it - Heart: people who engage in socialization - Clubs: people who engage in competition Note that these are more behaviors than phenotypes but most players have preferences among them.

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Here are the player categories that the developers of Magic The Gathering came up with https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type
- Iv 6y ago
  Interesting. That's funny "Johnny/Jenny mostly describe "cheesers" in Starcraft
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    Johnny is the guy who comes up with his own build orders and refuses to play anything 'standard' (including cheeses). Some of the builds can turn into popular cheese, but the majority cheesers on the ladder are more like Spike. Florencio is probably the highest profile example.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Wow, that has become complicated over the years. I like it, though, as a Johnny... It was interesting to see FFG’s Netrunner designed to explicitly have appealing cards for each of these three archetypes, as opposed to MTG where they emerged over time before the designers started to keep them in mind.
meshenna 6y ago
How have I not heard of this? Thanks for the pointer. I went a-googling and found Richard Bartle's paper. [0] [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247190693_Hearts_clubs_diamonds_spades_Players_who_suit_MUDs https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247190693_Hearts_cl...

AbrahamParangi 6y ago

Things described as “game theory rational” often become irrational as soon as you introduce an error term with respect to the rules of the game. An example is the famous marshmallow experiment. It’s framed as a test of self-control and rationality, but what if the proctor is lying to you? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

whatshisface 6y ago
General distrust of all predictions about the future is more or less exactly what they claimed that the experiment was measuring.
- BobbyJo 6y ago
  That's interesting to learn, and makes sense. The ability to delay gratification is both an input for behavior, and an output from other personality traits. Subconsciously, I think I've always had this framework that the traits that influence our behavior were somehow separable or independent, which I guess isn't necessarily true. Personality traits I guess can be looked at as kind of an N-body problem, with every trait influencing every other. The output behavior is fed back into the system, and can then be looked at as kind of a force carrier. On the outside we think of there being N independent bodies, but as far as the real influence is concerned, they are really overlapping fields with no well-defined boundaries.

plumsempy 6y ago

Tangential. Games with good stories and gameplay are the same to me as novels, if not better. In that they allow me to experience things otherwise not possible. Like running for dear life when Dhaka is chasing you in Prince of Persia; or decimating a whole village in Skyrim and having that dark big hole in your chest for what you did carry on until you load the game again. But the most recent learning from myself has been from Divinity 2 Original Sin. Great game. There you have a main avatar and 3 other players, equally qualified in every sense, and you control all 4. The only difference between the avatar and the rest is one's identity tied to the avatar. At some point I realized my ranger and melee are pretty strong while wearing nothing but tattered loin clothes; while my avatar, a jack of everything cool and carrier of all the gear he could not even wear sucked. This was an epiphany for me in team spirit. I was hoarding everything cool for my avatar. This had 2 effects. Firstly, it starved the rest of the team from getting good, relevant gear. Secondly, the rest remained laser focused on a couple of skill trees while my avatar, or "I", was hoarding all the cool skills wanting to become a god of all the things or something. So I gave away some epic gear to my ranger and melee units and they got buffed a lot. And I also trimmed the avatar into a single well defined role (pyro summoner) and now I have a pretty strong team. I am pretty sure this pattern would have had a longer lasting effect on my personal and professional development as well, had I not felt it on my skin like that. Everyone knows you're supposed to share or not to be greedy but I wonder for how many that has been a matter of "life and death".

diplodocusaur 6y ago
Similar experience on an unrelated online game. There's just so much leveling up a single unit can do (caveat: depends on context). It sounds related to comparative advantage and synergy concepts. Games keep tending to be dismissed as mere entertainment, but there is a lot of value to be had by seriously thinking about them because they are toy models.