Collaborative Research: The Impact of Advice on Decision Making

PI团队过去在建议影响下的决策研究得出了一系列实验结果，这些结果表明，口碑建议在塑造人们做出的决策方面是一种非常强大的力量，并倾向于将这些决策推向理性理论预测的方向。更准确地说，他们之前的研究表明：1)实验室受试者倾向于听从天真的顾问的建议，也就是说，在他们所从事的任务中，顾问并不比他们更专业。2)这种建议会改变他们的行为，因为那些在天真建议下玩游戏或做决定的人，与那些没有这种建议的人玩相同游戏的人玩得不同。3)在游戏中根据天真的建议做出的决定比没有天真建议做出的决定更接近经济理论的预测。如果让被试在听取建议和听取建议所依据的信息之间做出选择，被试往往会选择听取建议，这表明他们对自己的决策能力缺乏信心，这与心理学家观察到的通常的以自我为中心的偏见或过度自信相反。建议提高效率或合理性的原因是，给出或接受建议的过程迫使决策者以一种不同于没有建议时的方式来思考他们所面临的问题。本研究项目将继续对具有战略和国家不确定性的各种经济环境中建议的提供和接受的作用进行实验研究。研究主要有三个重点，每个重点都有不同的实验项目。这些是(i)建议在个人决策中的作用，（ii）建议在学习迁移中的作用，以及（iii）建议在代际惯例形成中的作用。我们的目标是通过结合之前对个人决策的研究的一些元素来调查建议在改进中所起的作用。我们将比较那些从以前玩过游戏的“专家”那里得到建议的受试者和那些只能查看专家游戏历史的受试者的游戏。我们还会操纵建议提供者的经验量，例如，少至一段经验或多至100段经验。学习迁移指的是在一种环境中的经验帮助一个人理解在另一种环境中如何行为的过程，以前和正在进行的关于学习迁移的研究主要关注的是个人如何以及是否能够学习一些适用于相关战略情境的一般原则。总的来说，学习迁移似乎不是很强。个人很难把一般的博弈论原理从一个环境带到另一个环境，即使这个原理在一个环境中的具体应用似乎被理解了。正如之前的许多研究表明，在战略情境中建议的存在往往会增强理性，我们将调查建议在改善学习迁移中所起的作用。pi已经研究了许多不同游戏中的代际（或垂直）建议的提供和接受，但在社会和文化进化理论中，另一个重要的互动维度是代际（或水平）维度，在这个维度中，同一代的成员相互互动并相互影响，似乎很自然地要问，在这里，建议的提供和接受可能扮演什么角色。pi将研究给出和接受建议的这个维度，以便量化，例如，一代人的行为惯例强度与该惯例在后代玩家中的延续概率之间的关系。

The PI team's past research on decision making under the influence of advice has led to a body of experimental results that indicate that word-of-mouth advice is a very powerful force in shaping the decisions that people make and tends to push those decisions in the direction of the predictions of the rational theory. More precisely, their previous research has indicated that: 1) Laboratory subjects tend to follow the advice of naive advisors, i.e. advisors that are hardly any more expert in the task they are engaged in than they are. 2) This advice changes their behavior in the sense that subjects who play games or make decisions with naive advice play differently than those who play identical games without such advice. 3) The decisions made in games played with naive advice are closer to the predictions of economic theory than those made without it. 4) If given a choice between getting advice or the information upon which that advice was based, subjects tend to opt for the advice indicating a kind of under-confidence in their decision making abilities that is counter to the usual ego-centric bias or overconfidence observed by psychologists. 5) The reason why advice increases efficiency or rationality is that the process of giving and or receiving advice forces a decision maker to think about the problem they are facing in a way different from the way they would do so if no advice were offered. This research project will continue experimental research on the role of advice giving and receiving in a variety of economic environments with strategic and state uncertainty. There are three main foci of the research, each with a distinct experimental program. These are (i) the role of advice in individual decision-making, (ii) the role of advice in learning transfer, and (iii) the role of advice in intra-generational convention formation. The goal is to investigate the role that advice can play in improving by incorporating some of the elements of the previous research on individual decision-making , We will compare the play of subjects who receive advice from "experts" who have played the game previously with the play of subjects who are only able to view the history of play of the experts. We will also manipulate the amount of experience the advice giver has, e.g., as little as one period of experience or as much as 100 periods of experience. Previous and ongoing research on learning transfer -referring to the process whereby experience in one environment helps one to understand how to behave in another environment-has been concerned mainly with the question of how and whether individuals are able to learn some general principles that apply in related strategic situations. In general, learning transfer does not seem to be very strong. Individuals have trouble carrying over general game-theoretic principles from one environment to another, even if the specific application of the principle in one environment appears to be understood. As so much of the previous research has shown that the presence of advice in strategic situations tends to be rationality-enhancing, we will investigate the role that advice plays in improving learning transfer. The PIs have studied inter-generational (or vertical) advice giving and receiving in many different games, but another dimension of interaction that figures prominently in theories of social and cultural evolution is the intra-generational (or horizontal) dimension, in which members of the same generation interact with and influence one another, and it seems natural to ask what the role of advice giving and receiving might be here as well. The PIs will study this dimension of advice-giving and receiving in order to quantify, for example, the relationship between the strength of a convention of behavior within a generation to the continuation probability of that convention over subsequent generations of players.