I worked with a team of three on a project analyzing how closely people follow coordination recommendations under different circumstances. Participants play a hawk-dove game where they are incentivized to cooperate with an opponent to maximize payoffs through following given coordinated recommendations. They maximize their expected payoffs by following recommendations unless they believe their opponent will not follow them, meaning their choice is somewhat a function of trust. We designed survey software through qualtrics to create this game and hired people to play for small rewards through mTurk. We designed several scenarios with players playing against a robot, someone from an outgroup, an ingroup, and an unknown opponent. The experiment follows several experiments done on this similar topic, and we found results that actually differed from their findings. This basic experiment can have a variety of real-world applications, like answering why people are less likely to trust or cooperate someone from a different political party, how people follow institutional recommendations for the common good (wearing a mask) and more.

Personally I had a great experience with this project and it exceeded my expectations. Dr. Aldama was very helpful and let Gantavya and me take a lot of responsibility in guiding the approach to the project, setting up the experiments and executing them. It was a lot of work figuring out and perfecting the experiment and then launching it. As we launched, we faced many challenges. We had to restructure some parts of the experiment because we ran into issues matching people in live, so we decided to match players independently which ended up working. I really got a sense of what it was like to do real research, the challenges one faces and learned a lot about game theory and how people coordinate.