Personality-Based Graphical User Interface Design Guidelines

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Reward-mediated individual and altruistic behavior

Publication . Gomes, Samuel; Alves, Tomás; Dias, João; Martinho, Carlos

Recent research has taken a particular interest in observing the dynamics between individual and altruistic behavior. This is a commonly approached problem when reasoning about social dilemmas, which have a plethora of real-world counterparts in the fields of education, health, and economics. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, our study examines individual and altruistic interactions in the context of a game task, by analyzing the players’ strategies and interaction motives when facing different reward attribution functions. Consequently, a model for interaction motives is proposed, with the premise that the motives for interactions can be defined as a continuous space, ranging from self-oriented (associated with individual behaviors) to others-oriented (associated with altruistic behaviors). To evaluate the promotion of individual and altruistic behavior, we leverage Message Across, an in-loco two-player videogame with adaptable score attribution systems. We conducted a user testing phase (N = 66) to verify to what extent individual and altruistic score functions led players to vary their strategies and interaction motives orientations. Our results indicate that both of these metrics varied significantly and according to our expectations, leading us to believe in the suitability of applying an incentive-based strategy to moderate the emergence of in-game behavior perceivable as individual or altruistic.

2022Conference object

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The influence of reward on the social valence of interactions

Publication . Alves, Tomas; Gomes, Samuel; Dias, João; Martinho, Carlos

Throughout the years, social norms have been promoted as an informal enforcement mechanism for achieving beneficial collective outcomes. Among the most used methods to foster interactions, framing the context of a situation or setting in-game rules have shown strong results as mediators on how an individual interacts with their peers. Nevertheless, we found that there is a lack of research regarding the use of incentives such as scores to promote social interactions differing in valence. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, we propose the use of rewards to promote interactions varying in valence, i.e. positive or negative, in a two-player scenario. To do so, we defined social valence as a continuous scale with two poles represented by Complicate and Help. Then, we performed user tests where participants where asked to play a game with two reward-based systems to test on whether the scoring system influenced the social interaction valence. The results indicate that the developed reward-based systems were able to foster interactions diverging in social valence scores, providing insights on how factors such as incentives overlap individual's established social norms. These findings empower game developers and designers with a low-cost and effective policy tool that is able to promote in-game behavior changes.

2020Conference object

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