Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

KIS (knowledge and intentions in social dilemmas) is a process model of a cognitive-motivational theory of acting in a three person commons dilemma. The model provides an experimental tool to study how ecologically harmful actions evolve in commons problems by having differently parameterized variants of KIS interact with each other and with human subjects. KIS models the application and acquisition of ecological, social, and practical knowledge using a motive-driven decision procedure. To test this model, 42 subjects played a commons dilemma game in an unselfish or greedy social environment. Both environments were realized by pairs of appropriately configured KIS variants. Subjects did not recognize these co-players as being artificial and judged their motives accurately. Subjects' behavior in the unselfish environment was well predicted, however, in the greedy environment subjects based their decisions more on the state of the resource than was expected. To further test the model, we constructed a KIS variant for each subject with respect to the assessed individual motive structure and knowledge. These variants played the same in the same environments. Their actions were compared to the subjects' on both an aggregate and individual level. We obtained good fits in the unselfish environment. Systematic deviations in the greedy environment revealed that under this condition behavior was more determined by ecological aspects than by social comparison.