000			02375 am a22002173u 4500
042			_adc
100	1	0	_aBurton-Chellew, Maxwell N. _eauthor _92399
700	1	0	_aWest, Stuart A. _eauthor _92400
245	0	0	_aThe Black Box as a Control for Payoff-Based Learning in Economic Games
260			_c2022-11-16.
500			_a/pmc/articles/PMC7614088/
500			_a/pubmed/36686269
520			_aThe black box method was developed as an "asocial control" to allow for payoff-based learning while eliminating social responses in repeated public goods games. Players are told they must decide how many virtual coins they want to input into a virtual black box that will provide uncertain returns. However, in truth, they are playing with each other in a repeated social game. By "black boxing" the game's social aspects and payoff structure, the method creates a population of self-interested but ignorant or confused individuals that must learn the game's payoffs. This low-information environment, stripped of social concerns, provides an alternative, empirically derived null hypothesis for testing social behaviours, as opposed to the theoretical predictions of rational self-interested agents (Homo economicus). However, a potential problem is that participants can unwittingly affect the learning of other participants. Here, we test a solution to this problem in a range of public goods games by making participants interact, unknowingly, with simulated players ("computerised black box"). We find no significant differences in rates of learning between the original and the computerised black box, therefore either method can be used to investigate learning in games. These results, along with the fact that simulated agents can be programmed to behave in different ways, mean that the computerised black box has great potential for complementing studies of how individuals and groups learn under different environments in social dilemmas.
540			_a
540			_ahttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
546			_aen
690			_aArticle
655	7		_aText _2local
786	0		_nGames (Basel)
856	4	1	_uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.3390/g13060076 _zConnect to this object online.
999			_c1960 _d1960