Game of Chicken
Background
The Dove-Hawk paradigm (aka Game of Chicken) is a classic paradigm to study conflict and strategic decision-making. The basic premise of the Dove-Hawk paradigm (aka Game of Chicken) is that two parties compete for the same resources and must decide to (a) take the resources fast or (b) wait for the opponent's decision. If they decide to take the resource, they can either win the resource (=> the other person waited) or experience a devastating loss (=>the other person also went for the resource). If they wait, they either don't get the resource (=> the other person went for the resource) or are able to share it (=> the other person also waited).
Thomas Schelling (1960), an economist and Nobel laureate, was one of the first to formalize the 'Game of Chicken' into mathematical game theory in his seminal book 'The Strategy of Conflict'. In 1966, Anatol Rapoport and Albert M. Chammah’s empirically formalized the mathematical structure and behavioral dynamics of the game in their paper, 'The Game of Chicken'. In evolutionary biology, the mathematical model is credited to John Maynard Smith and George Price. They published a landmark paper in 1973 introducing the 'Hawk-Dove game' to model how animals contest resources.
Millisecond's 'Hungry Monkey Game' (HMG) is a computer-assisted implementation of the paradigm intended for children ages 8 to 12. The basic game premise is inspired by the 'Hungry Donkey Game', a child friendly Iowa Gambling Task published by Eveline A. Crone and Maurits W. van der Molen in 2004.
The goal of the HMG is to collect as many bananas as possible for a hungry monkey named "Charly" while competing with a (computer-generated) "second player", e.g. "Alex", for the offered fruits. Participants can decide to a) wait to see what the opponent is doing (= 'dove' behavior) or b) take the bananas right away (= 'hawk' behavior) When making their decisions they have to consider the following rules:
- If the participant takes the bananas and the opponent waits, the participant gets all the bananas offered
- If the opponent takes the bananas and the participant waits, the participant neither wins nor loses any bananas
- If the opponent and the participant wait, they equally share the bananas (each gets half)
- If both try to take the bananas, they each lose double the number of bananas offered
Task Procedure
The game is played with three different computer personas: a hawk opponent (grabs bananas with 80% probability), a dove opponent (grabs bananas with 20% probability) and a wild card one (grabs bananas with 50% probability). Each participant first plays against the random 'wild card' opponent, before playing the dove opponent and lastly, the hawk one.
In each of these blocks, participants are presented with 15 trials in which they have to make a dove-hawk decision. The name of the opponent for each block is randomly pulled from a pool of 3 gender-neutral names A second round of the three basic blocks continuously increases the number of bananas that can be won by 2 (max number of bananas that can be won = 30, max number of bananas that can be lost = 60).
The choice is not timed. Both 'players' make a decision independently of each other before the result is revealed.
What it Measures
The Dove-Hawk paradigm (aka Game of Chicken) is a classic paradigm to study conflict and strategic decision-making.
Psychological Domains
- Decision-making: Response to potential rewards and losses over time
- Risk-taking: Preference for high-reward/high risk or low-reward/low-risk
Main Performance Metrics
- Proportion Hawk Decisions: Proportion of Hawk Decisions in the various conditions of the task
Psychiatric Conditions
The Hungry Monkey Game (HMG) is intended for academic research
The hawk-dove varation of chicken for children. The participant plays against a computerized opponent that varies between hawkish and dovish strategies.
References
Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Game of Chicken.
Rapoport, A. and Chammah, A.M. (1966). The Game of Chicken. American Behavioral Scientist, 10.
Maynard Smith, J. and Price, G.R. (1973). The logic of animal conflict. Nature, 246, 15–18.
Meux, E.P. Meux (1973) Concern for the common good in an N-person game. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 414-418.
Hammerstein, P. (1981). The Role of Asymmetries in Animal Contests. Animal Behavior, 29, 193–205.
Cressman, R. (1995). Evolutionary Stability for Two-stage Hawk-Dove Games. Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics, 25, 145–155.
Kim, Y-G. (1995). Status signaling games in animal contests. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 176, 221–231.
de Heus, P., Hoogervorst, N., & van Dijk, E. (2010) Framing prisoners and chickens: Valence effects in the prisoner’s dilemma and the chicken game. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 736-742.
Balliet, D., Li, N.P., Macfarlan, S.J., Van Vugt, M. (2011) Sex Differences in Cooperation: A Meta-Analytic Review of Social Dilemmas, Psychological Bulletin, 137, 881-909.
Links
Wikipedia Article. Wikipedia article on the game of chicken.