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November 27, 2019

When in a large group of mostly anonymous members, such as in social media, people make decisions in a more calculated way than they know.Priscilla Du Preez/Unsplash

The choices we make in large group settings such as in online forums and social media might seem fairly automatic to us. But our decision-making process is more complicated than we know. So, researchers have been working to understand whats behind that seemingly intuitive process.

Now, new University of Washington research has discovered that in large groups of essentially anonymous members, people make choices based on a model of the mind of the group and an evolving simulation of how a choice will affect that theorized mind.

Using a mathematical framework with roots in artificial intelligence and robotics, UW researchers were able to uncover the process for how a person makes choices in groups. And, they also found they were able to predict a persons choice more often than more traditional descriptive methods. The results were published Wednesday, Nov. 27, in Science Advances.

Our results are particularly interesting in light of the increasing role of social media in dictating how humans behave as members of particular groups, said senior authorRajesh Rao, the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang professor in the UWs Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and co-director of theCenter for Neurotechnology.

In online forums and social media groups, the combined actions of anonymous group members can influence your next action, and conversely, your own action can change the future behavior of the entire group, Rao said.

The researchers wanted to find out what mechanisms are at play in settings like these.

In the paper, they explain that human behavior relies on predictions of future states of the environment a best guess at what might happen and the degree of uncertainty about that environment increases drastically in social settings. To predict what might happen when another human is involved, a person makes a model of the others mind, called a theory of mind, and then uses that model to simulate how ones own actions will affect that other mind.

While this act functions well for one-on-one interactions, the ability to model individual minds in a large group is much harder. The new research suggests that humans create an average model of a mind representative of the group even when the identities of the others are not known.

To investigate the complexities that arise in group decision-making, the researchers focused on the volunteers dilemma task, wherein a few individuals endure some costs to benefit the whole group. Examples of the task include guarding duty, blood donation and stepping forward to stop an act of violence in a public place, they explain in the paper.

To mimic this situation and study both behavioral and brain responses, the researchers put subjects in an MRI, one by one, and had them play a game. In the game, called a public goods game, the subjects contribution to a communal pot of money influences others and determines what everyone in the group gets back. A subject can decide to contribute a dollar or decide to free-ride that is, not contribute to get the reward in the hopes that others will contribute to the pot.

If the total contributions exceed a predetermined amount, everyone gets two dollars back. The subjects played dozens of rounds with others they never met. Unbeknownst to the subject, the others were actually simulated by a computer mimicking previous human players.

We can almost get a glimpse into a human mind and analyze its underlying computational mechanism for making collective decisions, said lead author Koosha Khalvati, a doctoral student in the Allen School. When interacting with a large number of people, we found that humans try to predict future group interactions based on a model of an average group members intention. Importantly, theyalso know that their own actions can influence the group. For example, theyare aware that eventhough they are anonymous to others, their selfish behavior would decrease collaboration in the group in future interactionsand possibly bring undesired outcomes.

In their study, the researchers were able to assign mathematical variables to these actions and create their own computer models for predicting what decisions the person might make during play. They found that their model predicts human behavior significantly better than reinforcement learning models that is, when a player learns to contribute based on how the previous round did or didnt pay out regardless of other players and more traditional descriptive approaches.

Given that the model provides a quantitative explanation for human behavior, Rao wondered if it may be useful when building machines that interact with humans.

In scenarios where a machine or software is interacting with large groups of people, our results may hold some lessons for AI, he said. A machine that simulates the mind of a group and simulates how its actions affect the group may lead to a more human-friendly AI whose behavior is better aligned with the values of humans.

Co-authors include Seongmin A. Park, Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis and Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, France; Saghar Mirbagheri, Department of Psychology, New York University; Remi Philippe, Mariateresa Sestito and Jean-Claude Dreher at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod.This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

For more information, contact Rao at rao@cs.washington.edu.

Continue reading here:
A method with roots in AI uncovers how humans make choices in groups and social media - UW News

The choices we make in large group settings such as in online forums and social media might seem fairly automatic to us. But our decision-making process is more complicated than we know. So, researchers have been working to understand whats behind that seemingly intuitive process.

Now, new University of Washington research has discovered that in large groups of essentially anonymous members, people make choices based on a model of the mind of the group and an evolving simulation of how a choice will affect that theorized mind.

Using a mathematical framework with roots in artificial intelligence and robotics, UW researchers were able to uncover the process for how a person makes choices in groups. And, they also found they were able to predict a persons choice more often than more traditional descriptive methods. The results were published inScience Advances.

Our results are particularly interesting in light of the increasing role of social media in dictating how humans behave as members of particular groups, said senior author Rajesh Rao, the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang professor in the UWs Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology.

In online forums and social media groups, the combined actions of anonymous group members can influence your next action, and conversely, your own action can change the future behavior of the entire group, Rao said.

The researchers wanted to find out what mechanisms are at play in settings like these.

In the paper, they explain that human behavior relies on predictions of future states of the environment a best guess at what might happen and the degree of uncertainty about that environment increases drastically in social settings. To predict what might happen when another human is involved, a person makes a model of the others mind, called a theory of mind, and then uses that model to simulate how ones own actions will affect that other mind.

While this act functions well for one-on-one interactions, the ability to model individual minds in a large group is much harder. The new research suggests that humans create an average model of a mind representative of the group even when the identities of the others are not known.

To investigate the complexities that arise in group decision-making, the researchers focused on the volunteers dilemma task, wherein a few individuals endure some costs to benefit the whole group. Examples of the task include guarding duty, blood donation and stepping forward to stop an act of violence in a public place, they explain in the paper.

To mimic this situation and study both behavioral and brain responses, the researchers put subjects in an MRI, one by one, and had them play a game. In the game, called a public goods game, the subjects contribution to a communal pot of money influences others and determines what everyone in the group gets back. A subject can decide to contribute a dollar or decide to free-ride that is, not contribute to get the reward in the hopes that others will contribute to the pot.

If the total contributions exceed a predetermined amount, everyone gets two dollars back. The subjects played dozens of rounds with others they never met. Unbeknownst to the subject, the others were actually simulated by a computer mimicking previous human players.

We can almost get a glimpse into a human mind and analyze its underlying computational mechanism for making collective decisions, said lead author Koosha Khalvati, a doctoral student in the Allen School. When interacting with a large number of people, we found that humans try to predict future group interactions based on a model of an average group members intention. Importantly, they also know that their own actions can influence the group. For example, they are aware that even though they are anonymous to others, their selfish behavior would decrease collaboration in the group in future interactions and possibly bring undesired outcomes.

In their study, the researchers were able to assign mathematical variables to these actions and create their own computer models for predicting what decisions the person might make during play. They found that their model predicts human behavior significantly better than reinforcement learning models that is, when a player learns to contribute based on how the previous round did or didnt pay out regardless of other players and more traditional descriptive approaches.

Given that the model provides a quantitative explanation for human behavior, Rao wondered if it may be useful when building machines that interact with humans.

In scenarios where a machine or software is interacting with large groups of people, our results may hold some lessons for AI, he said. A machine that simulates the mind of a group and simulates how its actions affect the group may lead to a more human-friendly AI whose behavior is better aligned with the values of humans.

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Method With Roots In AI Uncovers How Humans Make Choices In Groups And Social Media - Eurasia Review

The first person I talked to in Sword and Shields Wild Area gave me a three-day-old loaf of bread be careful with it, they said. The next person was German and greeted me with a Guten tag! before passing along a tin of beans, a food item they said fell from the sky and hit them in the head.

Interactions like these are plentiful in Sword and Shield; youve probably heard similar stories, too.

Sword and Shield, released for Nintendo Switch on Nov. 15, introduced an open multiplayer space called the Wild Area, where high-level Pokmon roam free. When youre online, plenty of other players inhabit the world, all running around, or riding bikes, doing their own thing. Some players stand in front of trees, as if theyre about to shake berries from their branches. Others are stuck in a seemingly perpetual search for looking for others to help in their Max Raid Battles.

Theres a feeling of social presence in Sword and Shield despite a lack of transparency on how the multiplayer features work. Its not entirely clear if these interactions are happening in real time, or if theyre snapshots of player behavior in the world.

I suspect the latter is the case: I often find myself chasing other players around as they zig-zag through the Wild Area a hint that, perhaps, theyre chasing others that I cant see. Responses from these echoes of players are pre-programmed, a series of messages that are chosen randomly by the game itself. You cant tell, necessarily, if someones interacting with you. Theres never a pop-up window or conversational choice about what response to send. If Im not speaking directly to other people, neither are they.

And yet, despite this understanding of the Wild Area and the players within it particularly, the limitations to engagement the characters darting around the open space feel real to me. I got choked up when I first connected online and interacted with another player. I had spent the majority of the game playing by myself in an empty world before Nintendo switched on the games online servers. It caught me by surprise to suddenly see a Wild Area teeming with life or, at least, the idea of it. It felt like a huge improvement.

Theres a certain presence to the Wild Area, something so perfectly constructed to feel alive, even when its not.

Scholars who study games and other virtual worlds often talk about the concept of presence, Dr. Katharine Ognyanova, assistant professor of communication and information at Rutgers University, told me. This includes ideas such as self-presence, feeling as if your avatar was really you. There is also spatial presence, feeling as if you were really inside that virtual world.

But in Sword and Shield, social presence is the most apt, the feeling as if there are real people interacting with you in the game world. Social presence is felt through two ideas: a perception of agency, as if theres another human controlling the avatars around you, and realistic human behavior, Ognyanova said.

Realistic human behavior is where Sword and Shield both works and somewhat fails the erratic way characters move makes it clear theres a real person behind it. Theres no way a non-player character would be programmed like that. But actual engagement is limited; there are no dialogue options, no way to verbally communicate with another player.

Ognyanova said communication is critical in forming relationships, which means we arent necessarily developing bonds with other players in Sword and Shields Wild Area. Rather, were connecting with them through the in-game options we are given.

Maybe players use those options to adapt within the system, learning to create a language of its own, like in Hearthstone. Communication in Blizzards digital card game is limited in an attempt to restrict certain kinds of trash talk, but players have learned to get around it. Researchers at the University of Jyvskyl in Finland found that players intentionally misuse Hearthstone emotes to communicate with other players, like using Hello both as a greeting and as a sarcastic way to nudge a slow player through a long pause.

Sword and Shield doesnt have even these sorts of basic communications options, but there are a few moments wherein players have to click buttons to interact with others namely, the Pokmon camp and in Max Raid Battles.

Cooking curry at the camp feels like the most intimate interaction available with strangers in Sword and Shield. Once youve set up a camp in the Wild Area, others can visit your tent. Their Pokmon play with yours. You can invite them to cook with you.

Together, you both fan flames, stir a pot, and throw your heart into your curry. It does feel really intimate in a weird way, Pokmon player Cel10e who asked Polygon to use their handle told me. You get to see, at least a simulation of, their real, actual button inputs.

They continued: Its really impressive to me just seeing how other peoples motions, and what Pokmon they have, and what they cook like, is this tiny little snapshot of another person playing the game at the same time as you, even without a chat feature or emote animations or anything.

Its not much, but you can imagine a persons presence in these moments. Whats their cooking style? How are they stirring? What Pokmon are they using? Its a level of engagement that feels just right for a Pokmon game, letting people connect enough to feel that presence, but not enough to let the toxic elements of online gaming seep in.

Its enough to imagine your own little place in this big word in a way that Pokmon games havent let you experience yet. I said it in my review: Sword and Shield open up the world enough to spark wonder the Pokmon chasing me in the Wild Area are a part of that. The other part is existing in a dynamic, changing multiplayer area with both friends and strangers.

Players are using these systems to telegraph things to other players, to help curate these experiences, similar to how camps are constructed by NPCs in the Galar regions routes. Clips from Pokmon camps, some random encounters, others curated experiences like a gaggle of Ditto or Pichu and a Toxel daycare.

You can stumble into others camps randomly, but much of the social game here is going on social media, in clips posted to Twitter or Facebook. Communication and connection is pushed outside of the game, but in a way that still impacts the play experience; theres the idea that you could encounter those players have your own meme experiences to post in Sword and Shields multiplayer area.

Sword and Shields Wild Area has limitations, and players are adapting to work around them. Those limitations extend beyond how players interact; there are very real server problems in Sword and Shield. Digital Foundry noted that connecting to the internet in Sword and Shields Wild Area causes drastic performance drops.

The online interaction in Sword and Shield feels magical, but its still just the beginning. This isnt a massively-multiplayer online game, not even close. And yet, I finally feel like the Pokmon champion I always thought I was.

And Im still humble enough to wander around the world handing out sausages and beans to other players, too.

See original here:
In Pokemon Sword and Shield, you cant meet people, but youll feel them - Polygon

Across the globe, caring for loved ones is what matters most.

But, for decades this has not been the focus of many social psychology studies. An international team of researchers led by evolutionary and social psychologists from Arizona State University surveyed over 7,000 people from 27 different countries about what motivates them, and the findings go against 40 years of research. The study will be published on December 3, 2019, in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

People consistently rated kin care and mate retention as the most important motivations in their lives, and we found this over and over, in all 27 countries that participated, said Ahra Ko, an ASU psychology graduate student and first author on the paper. The findings replicated in regions with collectivistic cultures, such as Korea and China, and in regions with individualistic cultures like Europe and the US.

The study included people from diverse countries ranging from Australia and Bulgaria to Thailand and Uganda that covered all continents except Antarctica. The ASU team sent a survey about fundamental motivations to scientists in each of the participating countries. Then, the researchers in each country translated the questions into the native language and made edits so that all the questions were culturally appropriate.

For the past 40 years, evolutionary psychological research has focused on how people find romantic or sexual partners and how this desire affects other behaviors, like consumer decisions. But study participants consistently rated this motivation called mate seeking as the least important factor in their lives.

Evolutionary psychologists define kin care as caring for and supporting family members, and mate retention as maintaining long-term committed romantic or sexual relationships. These two motivations were the most important even in groups of people thought to prioritize finding new romantic and sexual partnerships, like young adults and people not in committed relationships.

The focus on mate seeking in evolutionary psychology is understandable, given the importance of reproduction. Another reason for the overemphasis on initial attraction is that college students have historically been the majority of participants, said Cari Pick, an ASU psychology graduate student and second author on the paper. College students do appear to be relatively more interested in finding sexual and romantic partners than other groups of people.

In all 27 countries, singles prioritized finding new partners more than people in committed relationships, and men ranked mate seeking higher than women. But, the differences between these groups were small because of the overall priority given to kin care.

Studying attraction is easy and sexy, but peoples everyday interests are actually more focused on something more wholesome family values, said Douglas Kenrick, Presidents Professor of Psychology at ASU and senior author on the study. Everybody cares about their family and loved ones the most, which, surprisingly, hasnt been as carefully studied as a motivator of human behavior.

The motivations of mate seeking and kin care were also related to psychological well-being, but in opposite ways. People who ranked mate seeking as the most important were less satisfied with their lives and were more likely to be depressed or anxious. People who ranked kin care and long-term relationships as the most important rated their lives as more satisfying.

People might think they will be happy with numerous sexual partners, but really they are happiest taking care of the people they already have, Kenrick said.

The research team is currently working on collecting information about the relationships among fundamental motivations and well-being around the world.

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ASUs Michael Varnum, associate professor of psychology, along with Jung Yul Kwon, Michael Barlev, Jaimie Krems and Rebecca Neel also contributed to the study. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

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All Around the World, Caring for Family Is What Motivates People Most - SciTechDaily

Losing a job can be stressful and demoralizing. Seeing your role replaced by automation is an additional stressor that more workers will have to contend with and worry about in the future.

Robots are already replacing people in some jobs. Apps take orders in chain restaurants, and some supermarkets use self-checkout machines to replace checkers. This is the new reality. The Brookings Institution predicts that 36 million Americans face a high exposure to automation in the coming decades, meaning they will have more than 70% of their role at risk of being substituted by artificial intelligence.

If you had to choose between getting replaced in your job by a robot or by another human, which would you pick? Thats the hard choice that researchers at the Technical University of Munich and Erasmus University in Rotterdam posed to almost 2,000 respondents in a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Turns out, thanks to our egos, we take job loss harder when its our fellow human replacing us, not robots. Most of us would actually rather lose our jobs to robots than other humans if we were forced to choose.

Our egos prefer getting replaced by a bot we cant be compared to.

In a series of studies, researchers Armin Granulo, Christoph Fuchs and Stefano Puntoni asked participants to imagine scenarios in which they were employees being replaced by modern software.

In one study scenario, a large manufacturing firm was reorganizing and some of the existing employees were going to lose their jobs. To achieve the reorganization goals, participants were told, the company had two options: Replace existing employees either with new employees or by robots that could do the tasks automatically.

When they were observers of this scenario, 67% of participants preferred to see the employees replaced by fellow humans rather than by robots. But when participants were told that their own job was at risk, the stakes got more personal. The majority (60%) said they would prefer getting replaced by a robot rather than a fellow human.

In another exercise, researchers measured how sad, frustrated or angry participants felt about the replacement scenario. People losing jobs to robots got a more negative reaction when participants were observers, but when it was their own fictional job on the line, participants said they were more upset about getting replaced by a human.

Why does getting replaced by a fellow colleague seemingly upset us more than getting replaced by a robot? The researchers suggest this contradiction makes sense once you consider human egos.

Its much harder to compare yourself to a robot than to another person, Granulo, the studys lead author, told HuffPost. Your identity is really threatened if you are replaced by somebody else, because its easy to compare yourself to another person and think, Hey, why is he better? In other words, when a colleague with similar human skills is picked to replace you, you may question your own abilities in a way that you would not if replaced by software.

Fuchs said we may have different motives when we are given the opportunity to give someone else employment over a robot, without risking our own role. From a safe observational distance, we tend to think, Well, its better that humans have jobs, Fuchs said.

The technological replacement of human labor has unique psychological consequences, and these consequences should be taken into account, Granulo said. The psychological effects of peoples self-worth, how they think about their future and their skills... it matters why people lose their jobs.

Its important to remember that automation is not a faceless robot coming for your job.

Losing your job sucks. But research shows that we can handle hard business decisions like layoffs when we know that the process was fair and we could give input into the process and had ample notice. If you want to change someones job with automation, it shouldnt just happen out of nowhere.

But, unfortunately, thats what some workers who are actually experiencing automation feel is happening. A November report from the think tank New America was based on 40 in-depth interviews with grocery, food, retail and administrative workers on the frontlines of automation. For them, automation was not a faceless inevitability but a conscious decision made by human managers.

We heard, over and over, that employees felt that the companies they worked for were looking for ways to cut costs, that they were putting shareholder value over the wellbeing of their workers, said Molly Kinder, the lead author of the report and a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A lot of them, when they talked about a decision to put in a self-checkout lane, this was not inevitable. They felt there was a choice their employer made, and what was driving this choice was this emphasis on profits.

We dont necessarily have a beef with robots, in other words, but we do have one with managers who make us feel like our contributions dont matter. The technology itself is not the issue; its the extent to which workers are involved in the process and how it ultimately impacts their job satisfaction, their job quality and their job security, Kinder said.

Take it from Naomi, an assistant manager of an apartment complex who was interviewed in the New America report. She felt a lack of agency over software changes at her job. [New employees] wont come to me for benefit questions anymore because its all there through ADP, a human resources software program, she said. They could get rid of me and eliminate my job. The most annoying thing is that your fate is in someone elses hands.

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We Would Rather Lose Our Jobs To Robots Than Humans - HuffPost