The role of social cognition in decision making

Successful decision making in a social setting depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions and beliefs of others. The mirror system allows us to understand other people's motor actions and action intentions. ‘Empathy’ allows us to understand and share emotions and sensations with others. ‘Theory of mind’ allows us to understand more abstract concepts such as beliefs or wishes in others. In all these cases, evidence has accumulated that we use the specific neural networks engaged in processing mental states in ourselves to understand the same mental states in others. However, the magnitude of the brain activity in these shared networks is modulated by contextual appraisal of the situation or the other person. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concerns the interaction of reason and emotion. We consider four domains where such interactions occur: our sense of fairness, altruistic punishment, trust and framing effects. In these cases, social motivations and emotions compete with each other, while higher-level control processes modulate the interactions of these low-level biases

Correlation of Positive and Negative Reciprocity Fails to Confer an Evolutionary Advantage: Phase Transitions to Elementary Strategies

Economic experiments reveal that humans value cooperation and fairness. Punishing unfair behavior is therefore common, and according to the theory of strong reciprocity, it is also directly related to rewarding cooperative behavior. However, empirical data fail to confirm that positive and negative reciprocity are correlated. Inspired by this disagreement, we determine whether the combined application of reward and punishment is evolutionarily advantageous. We study a spatial public goods game, where in addition to the three elementary strategies of defection, rewarding, and punishment, a fourth strategy that combines the latter two competes for space. We find rich dynamical behavior that gives rise to intricate phase diagrams where continuous and discontinuous phase transitions occur in succession. Indirect territorial competition, spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance, as well as divergent fluctuations of oscillations that terminate in an absorbing phase are observed. Yet, despite the high complexity of solutions, the combined strategy can survive only in very narrow and unrealistic parameter regions. Elementary strategies, either in pure or mixed phases, are much more common and likely to prevail. Our results highlight the importance of patterns and structure in human cooperation, which should be considered in future experiments

Bisemivalues for bicooperative games

We introduce bisemivalues for bicooperative games and we also provide an interesting characterization of this kind of values by means of weighting coefficients in a similar way as it was given for semivalues in the context of cooperative games. Moreover, the notion of induced bisemivalues on lower cardinalities also makes sense and an adaptation of Dragan’s recurrence formula is obtained. For the particular case of (p, q)-bisemivalues, a computational procedure in terms of the multilinear extension of the game is given.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

From individual characters to large crowds: augmenting the believability of open-world games through exploring social emotion in pedestrian groups

Crowds of non-player characters improve the game-play experiences of open-world video-games. Grouping is a common phenomenon of crowds and plays an important role in crowd behaviour. Recent crowd simulation research focuses on group modelling in pedestrian crowds and game-designers have argued that the design of non-player characters should capture and exploit the relationship between characters. The concepts of social groups and inter-character relationships are not new in social psychology, and on-going work addresses the social life of emotions and its behavioural consequences on individuals and groups alike. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of current research in social psychology, and to use the findings as a source of inspiration to design a social network of non-player characters, with application to the problem of group modelling in simulated crowds in computer games

Analysis of the gamification applications to improve the energy savings in residential buildings

This paper proposes a set of metrics to evaluate and compare applications in a new but quickly developing field – energy management software (EMS) in residential buildings. The goal of the paper is to highlight tendencies and to detect drawbacks of pre sent applications to develop a new one taking into account the results of previous analysis. It shows a shortlist of applications examined. Provides the conclusion drawing to the metrics and proposes mai n issues to be considered in the development of a new application.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Experimentally Observed Imitation and Cooperation in Price Competition on the Circle

This paper reports an experiment on a location game, the so-called "Price-Competition on the Circle." There are n symmetric firms equidistantly located on a circle. Consumers are uniformly distributed. Each consumer buys one and only one unit from that firm whose price, including the cost of transportation, is the lowest, provided such a price is below a maximum willingness to pay. Experiments, extended over 200 periods, were run with 3, 4, and 5 participants. Subjects did not receive any information about the relationship between prices and profits, but they received feedback on prices and profits of two neighbors after each period. The evaluation compares predictions derived from imitation equilibrium (Selten and Ostmann 2001) and Cournot equilibrium, as well as symmetric joint-profit maximization. The results qualitatively favor imitation equilibrium, as long as no cooperation is observed.Imitation, Cooperation, Location, Experiments

Learning in Repeated Games: Human Versus Machine

While Artificial Intelligence has successfully outperformed humans in complex combinatorial games (such as chess and checkers), humans have retained their supremacy in social interactions that require intuition and adaptation, such as cooperation and coordination games. Despite significant advances in learning algorithms, most algorithms adapt at times scales which are not relevant for interactions with humans, and therefore the advances in AI on this front have remained of a more theoretical nature. This has also hindered the experimental evaluation of how these algorithms perform against humans, as the length of experiments needed to evaluate them is beyond what humans are reasonably expected to endure (max 100 repetitions). This scenario is rapidly changing, as recent algorithms are able to converge to their functional regimes in shorter time-scales. Additionally, this shift opens up possibilities for experimental investigation: where do humans stand compared with these new algorithms? We evaluate humans experimentally against a representative element of these fast-converging algorithms. Our results indicate that the performance of at least one of these algorithms is comparable to, and even exceeds, the performance of people

The Debate over "Wittgensteinian Fideism" and Phillips’ Contemplative Philosophy of Religion

When surveying the scholarly literature over Wittgensteinian fideism, it is easy to get the sense that the principal interlocutors, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips, talk past one another, but finding the right words for appraising the distance between the two voices is difficult. In this paper, I seek to appreciate this intellectual distance through an exploration of the varying philosophical aims of Nielsen and Phillips, of the different intellectual imperatives that guide their respective conceptions of philosophical practice. In so doing, I seek to show how a contemplative mode in philosophy may be used to appraise a philosophical dispute and the terms of disagreement. In this case, a contemplative approach to understanding the dispute would frame Nielsen’s and Phillips’ contributions against the backdrop of the ends they conceive philosophy to have