Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Identifying Chaos In Human Interactive Decision-Making, Susan E. Rhoads

Honors Theses

Human subjects played two computer versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma (Poundstone, 1992). By varying the payoff scales and instructions, one version of the game encouraged competition whereas the other encouraged cooperation. The data were entered into a computer program capable of generating a Sierpinski carpet with strings of random variables. The completion percentage of the resulting carpets indicated the degree to which the game-specific interactions approached chaos. The Sierpinski carpets resulting from the cooperation games showed significantly higher completion percentages than the carpets resulting from the competition games. Because chaotic behavior is unpredictable in the stream of its occurrence, research …