Chapter 4: Human experiments... for Science!

It's been over a month since my last post here already! It's been rather hectic the last couple of weeks, mostly because I've been working on the project, but also because most of the interns will be leaving ICT soon, and everyone is trying to cram in some fun events during the little free time that we have left.

Last month I talked about needing to improve the presentation of information in the poker game. With the help of some ICT people the interface had been improved a bunch and the explanation of the games presented to the player is now a lot clearer. My supervisor (Jon Gratch) wanted to recreate an experiment that one of his students had done a while ago, so he asked me to add another game to my experiment, called the Investment game. This investment game is basically the same as the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where each player has two choices each round. The combination of the two players' choices determine the amount of points both players receive.

As you might be able to see, I used the same dashboard element from the poker game in this game, replacing the amount of chips by the score of the players. Most of the server-side code from the poker game was generic enough that it was rather easy to rewrite it to work for the Investment game.

The experiment was nearing completion now, but it needed one more thing before I could start inviting participants: a bunch of surveys. Before the participants would start any of the games, they will need to fill in a number of surveys to determine a number of personality traits. The surveys we were supposed to use were the following four:
- DANVA
- SVO
- Mach-IV
- ERQ

I won't bore you with the details of each of those surveys, if you wish to know more, Google will be able to tell you plenty. In short, these surveys tell if you are a competitive person and whether or not you are able to perceive and/or display emotions. After each game, the participant was also asked to fill in a little survey about his/her experience with the game. ICT uses a website called Qualtrics to easily create, edit and share these kinds of questionnaires and all of these required surveys were readily available for me to use. I just needed to set up the Survey Flow so participants could seamlessly go between my games and the Qualtrics questionnaires.

As happens often with programming jobs, Jon Gratch announced last-minute that he would like to implement two different conditions. Some of the participants would not be able to see each other while playing the games, while other participants would play as usual. The recording of facial expressions would be enabled at all times, but some of them would not see their opponent. When players believe they are not directly being watched, they might be more inclined to show facial expressions, even though they know they are being recorded. Easy fix: simply draw a blank rectangle over the area where the opponent's face is supposed to be in the games with the no-camera condition.

Participants were recruited from Craigslist and promised a $30 reward for an experiment lasting approximately 60 minutes. We created a total of 40 possible time slots where people could sign up for, these sign-ups were completely full within two hours of posting on Craigslist - apparently these experiments are popular. Approximately 30 out of 40 people actually showed up. Whenever someone didn't show up, I would need to use an ICT confederate to step in in order to maintain an even amount of participants.

Now that all of the experiments are finished (for now), I'll need to analyze all of the gathered data and try to make sense of it!