Reward-Mediated Individual and Altruistic Behavior

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 realworld 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.