Switching Competitors Reduces Win-Stay but Not Lose-Shift Behaviour: The Role of Outcome-Action Association Strength on Reinforcement Learning
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predictability is a hallmark of poor-quality decision-making during competition. One source of predictability is the strong association between current outcome and future action, as dictated by the reinforcement learning principles of win–stay and lose–shift. We tested the idea that predictability could be reduced during competition by weakening the associations between outcome and action. To do this, participants completed a competitive zero-sum game in which the opponent from the current trial was either replayed (opponent repeat) thereby strengthening the association, or, replaced (opponent change) by a different competitor thereby weakening the association. We observed that win–stay behavior was reduced during opponent change trials but lose–shiftbehavior remained reliably predictable. Consistent with the group data, the number of individuals who exhibited predictable behavior following wins decreased for opponent change relative to opponent repeat trials. Our data show that future actions are more under internal control following positive relative to negative outcomes, and that externally breaking the bonds between outcome and action via opponent association also allows us to become less prone to exploitation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it