{"pk":29516,"title":"Recursive Adversarial Reasoning in the Rock, Paper, Scissors Game","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In this study, we investigate people’s ability to predict andadapt to the behavior of others in order to make plans of theirown, a cornerstone of cooperative and competitive behavior.Participants played 300 rounds of rock, paper, scissors againstanother human player. We investigate the degree to which par-ticipants are able to identify patterns in their opponent’s be-havior in order to exploit them in subsequent rounds. We findstrong evidence that participants exploit their opponents overthe course of 300 rounds, suggesting that people identify de-pendencies in their opponent’s move choices during the game.Nonetheless, analysis of dependencies across participant movechoices reveals that people exhibit a number of regularities intheir own moves. Based on these dependencies, we argue thatparticipants are far from optimal in their exploiting, suggestingthat there are substantial constraints on people’s ability to iden-tify and adapt to patterned opponent behavior across repeatedinteractions.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"adaptive reasoning; adversarial reasoning; non-cooperative games; rock paper scissors"}],"section":"Pragmatics","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sp2722s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Erik","middle_name":"","last_name":"Brockbank","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Edward","middle_name":"","last_name":"Vul","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29516/galley/19376/download/"}]}