Collaborative Research: Impacts of social context and ecology on strategic decisions in dynamic interactions

理解个体如何在协调有益的社会环境中管理或未能协调他们的行为，是社会科学的一个基本目标。就我们促进或阻碍协调的能力而言，这种理解对于提高团队的表现或扰乱对手的表现也具有重要的实际意义。最近的研究使用博弈论中的简单经济博弈作为人类决策的模型，调查了人与人之间社会环境中战略互动的基础。最近，这些方法被用来更广泛地观察灵长类物种的战略行为，允许进行物种间的比较。然而，在人类和其他灵长类动物中，这项工作的大部分只涉及成对的个人，而在现实世界中，这样的决定发生在更大的社会群体快速变化的动态中。目前的研究项目将研究两种非人类灵长类动物-卷尾猴和黑猩猩-在其社会群体中互动时做出的决定。研究的重点将是这些物种如何根据相互作用发生的社会背景和生态条件解决协调问题。这项研究还将检验人类受试者在与研究非人类灵长类动物的虚拟环境相匹配的虚拟环境中的行为。这项研究有两个主要目标。第一个是考察在个人可以协调(或不协调)以获得奖励的情况下，谁参与了，谁没有参与，参与如何随着回报而变化，以及它如何随着社会背景的变化而变化。两个物种--黑猩猩和卷尾猴--被选为研究的这一部分，因为有证据表明，这两个物种都合作，在合作成功方面表现出不同，并且可以在足够大的社会群体中进行研究。第二个目标是用人类来考察生态条件和这些条件的变化对战略行为表现的影响。主体将在具有特定生态条件的虚拟环境中做出决策，在虚拟环境中，合作或反合作的利益可能会有所不同。虚拟环境的特征将与已经观察到卷尾猴和黑猩猩行为的环境特征相匹配，从而实现物种间的比较。研究的这一部分将阐明语言对人类在社会互动中获得帕累托最优解决方案的非凡能力有多重要

Understanding how individuals manage or fail to coordinate their behavior in social settings where coordination is beneficial is a fundamental objective of social science. To the extent such understanding informs our ability to promote or impede coordination it is also of great practical importance for improving the performance of teams or disrupting the performance of adversaries. Recent research has investigated the underpinnings of strategic interactions in social settings between humans using simple economic games drawn from game theory as models for human decision-making. Even more recently, these methods have been used to look at strategic behavior more broadly across primate species, allowing for inter-species comparisons. Much of this work, however, in both humans and other primates, has involved only pairs of individuals, whereas in the real world such decisions take place within the rapidly changing dynamics of larger social groups. The current research project will study the decisions made by two species of non-human primates, capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees, while they are interacting in their social groups. The research will focus on how these species solve coordination problems depending on the social context and ecological conditions in which the interactions occur. The research will also examine how human subjects behave in virtual environments matched to those in which the non-human primates have been studied. The research has two primary objectives. The first is to examine who participates and doesn't in situations where individuals can coordinate (or not) to acquire a reward, how participation varies with payoffs, and how it varies with changes in social context. Two species - chimpanzees and capuchins - are selected for this part of the study because there is evidence that both cooperate, exhibit variation in success in cooperating, and are available for study in sufficiently large social groups. The second aim is to use humans to examine the influence of ecological conditions and variation in such conditions on the manifestation of strategic behavior. Subjects will make decisions in a virtual environment with specific ecological conditions and in which benefits of cooperation or anti-cooperation can be varied. The characteristics of the virtual environment will match features of environments in which behavior of capuchins and chimpanzees has already been observed to enable interspecies comparison. This part of the study will shine light on the question of how important language is to humans' remarkable ability to come to pareto optimal solutions in social interactions