Loss impresses human beings more than gain in the decision-making game
This research addresses how loss aversion influences decision-making in human-computer interactions, providing incremental insights into neural correlates of economic behavior.
The study investigated human decision-making in a zero-sum game against a computer, finding that people are more sensitive to losses than gains, with this effect intensifying as the loss-gain gap increases, and EEG signals showed distinguishable patterns before decisions and negative waves in the forebrain during high outcome expectations.
What happen in the brain when human beings play games with computers? Here a simple zero-sum game was conducted to investigate how people make decision via their brain even they know that their opponent is a computer. There are two choices (a low or high number) for people and also two strategies for the computer (red color or green color). When the number selected by the human subject meet the red color, the person loses the score which is equal to the number. On the contrary, the person gains the number of score if the computer chooses a green color for the number selected by the human being. Both the human subject and the computer give their choice at the same time, and subjects have been told that the computer make its decision randomly on the red color or green color. During the experiments, the signal of electroencephalograph (EEG) obtained from brain of subjects was recorded. From the analysis of EEG, we find that people mind the loss more than the gain, and the phenomenon becoming obvious when the gap between loss and gain grows. In addition, the signal of EEG is clearly distinguishable before making different decisions. It is observed that significant negative waves in the entire brain region when the participant has a greater expectation for the outcome, and these negative waves are mainly concentrated in the forebrain region in the brain of human beings.