Schulze Christin, van Ravenzwaaij Don, Newell Ben R
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia.
Cogn Psychol. 2015 May;78:78-98. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2015.03.002. Epub 2015 Apr 8.
In a world of limited resources, scarcity and rivalry are central challenges for decision makers-animals foraging for food, corporations seeking maximal profits, and athletes training to win, all strive against others competing for the same goals. In this article, we establish the role of competitive pressures for the facilitation of optimal decision making in simple sequential binary choice tasks. In two experiments, competition was introduced with a computerized opponent whose choice behavior reinforced one of two strategies: If the opponent probabilistically imitated participant choices, probability matching was optimal; if the opponent was indifferent, probability maximizing was optimal. We observed accurate asymptotic strategy use in both conditions irrespective of the provision of outcome probabilities, suggesting that participants were sensitive to the differences in opponent behavior. An analysis of reinforcement learning models established that computational conceptualizations of opponent behavior are critical to account for the observed divergence in strategy adoption. Our results provide a novel appraisal of probability matching and show how this individually 'irrational' choice phenomenon can be socially adaptive under competition.
在一个资源有限的世界里，稀缺性和竞争性是决策者面临的核心挑战——动物觅食、企业追求利润最大化、运动员训练以求获胜，所有这些都要与为实现相同目标而竞争的其他个体展开较量。在本文中，我们确立了竞争压力在简单的顺序二元选择任务中促进最优决策的作用。在两项实验中，引入了与计算机对手的竞争，对手的选择行为强化了两种策略之一：如果对手概率性地模仿参与者的选择，概率匹配是最优的；如果对手无差别对待，概率最大化是最优的。我们观察到，无论是否提供结果概率，在两种情况下参与者都能准确地渐近使用策略，这表明参与者对对手行为的差异很敏感。对强化学习模型的分析表明，对手行为的计算概念对于解释观察到的策略采用差异至关重要。我们的结果对概率匹配进行了新的评估，并展示了这种个体上“不理性”的选择现象在竞争情况下如何具有社会适应性。
