teasergit
commented
10 months ago We plan to not tell the participants about the fake competition, only for debrief. If we do only one experiment session, we will tell them that they will see the score and progress of past participants replayed. If we manage to have participants study at will for several days, we will tell them they are seeing live scores and progress of the other participants. And yea, we are unsure yet about whether to do a control group, or not. Depends a bit on the number of participants we can collect as well. A control group would be desirable though, but they would have no competition element at all, we do not plan on comparing deception vs. transparency. Thanks for the comment :)
You specify that the user will be playing against a computer model. However have you thought about what you will tell your experiment participants? Are you going to disclose that they are playing against a computer-generated player, or will you intentionally lie in order to evoke a feeling of competition with another person? I would expect that the latter would boost the performance of the users, as the mere thought of competing with another person can be a very motivating factor. Another option would be to check for this effect and try to replicate past psychological findings by introducing two separate conditions: one where the user is aware that they are playing against the computer and another where the user is told they play against another human (although in reality they are not).
Best, Team Apple