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

了解个人如何在社会环境中管理或未能协调他们的行为，而协调是有益的，是社会科学的一个基本目标。在某种程度上，这种理解告诉我们促进或阻碍协调的能力，它对于提高团队的表现或破坏对手的表现也具有重要的实际意义。最近的研究利用博弈论中的简单经济博弈作为人类决策模型，调查了人类社会环境中战略互动的基础。甚至在最近，这些方法被用于更广泛地研究灵长类物种的策略行为，允许物种间的比较。然而，在人类和其他灵长类动物中，这种工作大多只涉及成对的个体，而在现实世界中，这种决定发生在快速变化的更大的社会群体中。目前的研究项目将研究卷尾猴和黑猩猩这两种非人类灵长类动物在社会群体中互动时所做的决定。研究将集中在这些物种如何解决协调问题，这取决于相互作用发生的社会背景和生态条件。这项研究还将研究人类受试者在虚拟环境中的行为，这些虚拟环境与非人类灵长类动物的研究环境相匹配。这项研究有两个主要目标。第一个是研究在个人可以协调（或不协调）获得奖励的情况下，谁参与，谁不参与，参与如何随着回报而变化，以及如何随着社会背景的变化而变化。之所以选择黑猩猩和卷尾猴这两个物种作为这部分研究的对象，是因为有证据表明，这两个物种都是合作的，在合作成功方面表现出差异，并且可以在足够大的社会群体中进行研究。第二个目的是利用人类来研究生态条件和这种条件下的变化对战略行为表现的影响。受试者将在一个具有特定生态条件的虚拟环境中做出决策，在这个虚拟环境中，合作或反合作的利益是不同的。虚拟环境的特征将与已经观察到的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。这项研究的这一部分将阐明语言对人类在社会交往中获得帕累托最优解决方案的卓越能力有多重要

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