Psychology and Behavior
. Social Sciences
Social dilemmas and game theory provide tools and strategies for measuring and quantifying an individual's social traits based on their actions when these individuals confront their own benefit with another's interest or with the collective interest. These dilemmas therefore make it possible to analyze, for example, the levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity and sense of collectivity that arise when participants in these types of experiments play together and interact with each other generally through a digital interface capable of gathering the data related to their decisions. The research carried out along these lines combines experimental performance with empirical analysis either through basic statistics or sophisticated clustering algorithms and with the provision of new models to better interpret what is been observed in the experiments.
At UBICS, researchers work together with many actors to build tailored-made research collectives to address concerns and issues grounded mostly in urban contexts. Our methodology is based on community processes and provides a large set of social dilemmas and dyadic games for the understanding of specific behavioural traits in social interactions. By means of citizen science strategies, our experimental setup was placed in the wild with situated, public and participatory experiments involving citizens at different levels. We have been working in several neighborhoods, applying this methodology to study the mechanisms behind collective climate actions to provide innovative tools for schools to increase student’s motivation or to better understand mental health care in community ecosystem.
Researchers involved in this line are:
