Quote:
Originally Posted by Lyte
Forcing players to choose only 1 Honor category was an intentional choice we made to analyze some of the behavioral responses to Honor. In the sciences, this is known as an "Alternative Forced Choice" paradigm [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-alt..._forced_choice]
Although the Honor 'design' isn't exactly the same as a traditional 2AFC experiment, there are some similarities. Feel free to take a guess about why we chose this method 
|
If I had to guess, I'd say that forcing someone to choose between alternatives allows you some insight into their decision making processes.
Sometimes a teammate might not be very helpful or insightful, but will keep the team spirit up - or maybe he has yet to improve as a team player, but is very friendly and polite. Sometimes, though, that person will be friendly AND polite AND good at teamwork... so what do you reward him with?
This puts the person on the tough spot of having to choose WHICH option to reward the other with. It makes the player think and review the other player's behaviour in order to determine which had more prevalence, which promotes reflexive thinking and requires you to review the behaviour you wish to reward, which is the exact opposite of always spamming only one kind of honour.
If a person only rewards teammates with one kind of reward, something's wrong, isn't it?
Kind of like how Tribunal rewards judges that carefully consider each case more than those who just spam Pardon or just Punish. right?
I think it also gives you some insight on what variables are perceived as more valuable to players: If the easiest crest to get right now was, by a significant amount, friendly, you can assume that people value friendliness and politeness over, say, teamwork skills - and that kind of data can be used to promote other ways to improve other areas and expand the experiment.
It also helps players, too. If I always get honour for being friendly, but I don't get as many for being helpful, I know where I have to improve.
I'm also a Psyche student, so pretty much everything you guys do piques my interest, although I'm far from getting a PhD at the moment :P