Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games

Area of Science:

• Behavioral economics
• Game theory
• Social psychology

Background:

• Strategic interactions are common in human and animal behavior.
• Game theory provides insights into human behavior, but often focuses on population-level or single-situation analyses.
• This limits understanding of individual behavioral consistency across diverse strategic contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish general behavioral rules governing individual actions in strategic situations.
• To identify consistent behavioral phenotypes across different dyadic games.
• To move towards a fact-based classification of human behavior in strategic interactions.

Main Methods:

• Conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment involving subjects playing four different dyadic games.
• Applied an unsupervised clustering algorithm to analyze subject behavior.
• Examined consistency of individual actions across multiple game scenarios.

Main Results:

• Identified a limited number of consistent behavioral phenotypes: envious, optimist, pessimist, and trustful.
• Found that a large majority of subjects conformed to these phenotypes with high consistency.
• Observed only a small fraction of subjects whose behavior could not be classified.

Conclusions:

• Individuals exhibit consistent behavioral phenotypes across various strategic situations.
• The findings support a classification of basic behavioral phenotypes without a priori assumptions.
• This research contributes to a fact-based approach applicable to societal simulations, policy-making, and business.