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November 29, 2021 – Thinking ahead – a kind of emergency planning with rapid fire in the brain – seems like an obvious skill to implement in games against an opponent with predictable moves. But a new study shows that people do the same when faced with an unpredictable adversary.
Many previous studies have documented how people use future thinking for non-social tasks such as navigating unfamiliar terrain or planning family vacations. The new study, published in eLife, offers new evidence on how people can also use forward thinking to try to control social situations.
For the new study, researchers asked 48 people to sit in brain scanners while playing different versions of a classic bargaining exercise known as an ultimatum game that requires people to fight over how to share $ 20. Games always start with a single player offering $ 5 to their opponent.
In foreseeable scenarios, the rejection of this offer will be met with an increase of $ 2, and the acceptance of this offer will be met with a decrease of $ 2. But in unpredictable scenarios, there was no logic in how much the bid could be increased or decreased in response to acceptance or rejection. The contestants played 40 rounds, alternating between these scenarios.
Scientists have noticed that people play differently when they think they can control the game. Under predictable scenarios, it took people longer to decide each move and end up receiving higher bids.
Interestingly, players told investigators that they feel controlled about 40% of the time when they play an unpredictable scenario. And when players played another round of games against a computer, they felt in control of the results more than half the time, whether they were playing a predictable or unpredictable scenario.
The researchers then conducted a computer simulation of these games to predict how far forward players would think before accepting or rejecting any offer. In both predictable and unpredictable versions of the game, computer models respond more closely to the results of games between human players, when machines assume that people will think at least two steps ahead.
Although this social experiment did not involve changing hands for real money, the results suggest two fascinating things about human nature: We may think we are in control, even when this is not true, and we will try to think ahead to outwit the adversary. or not, this strategizing can actually affect the outcome.
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