How AI and Gamification boost people’s behaviour

A research team from MIT has developed a method to help people better understand when to trust an AI teammate, e.g. when diagnosing medical conditions. The method is based on an onboarding technique that guides humans to develop a more accurate understanding of the AI’s predictions. Hussein Mozannar explains:

“We combine our knowledge about the human with what we know about the AI to see where it will be helpful for the human to rely on the AI. Then we obtain cases where we know the human should rely on the AI and similar cases where the human should not rely on the AI.”

Basically, the technique focuses on helping people learn artificial intelligence’s strengths and weaknesses, in order to produce positive outcomes. This from the prerequisite from cognitive science that suggests that humans make decisions for complex tasks by remembering past interactions and experiences. Learn more about the research here 

How gamified apps boost trading and risk-taking

Gamification is often seen as a disruptive technology that affects people’s behaviour. In this spirit, a team of Canadian researchers, Philipp Chapkovski, Mariana Khapko and Marius Zoican, asked themselves: Does the gamification of trading apps exacerbate risk-taking by individual traders? They recruited 605 participants from four countries, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, to answer this question. The researchers’ conclusion is that:

“This allows us to circumvent selection bias: that is, the possibility that less risk-averse traders might self-select to use gamified platforms in real life. We also find that the gamification effect on risk tolerance is particularly strong in assets that are risky, to begin with. The implication is that trading on a platform with such behavioural prompts is likely to tilt retail traders’ portfolios towards high-volatility asset classes such as derivatives and cryptocurrencies. (…) We also document that the impact of gamified trading is stronger for arguably the most vulnerable groups: inexperienced traders with low levels of financial literacy.”

See the full research report here

Understanding to boost people’s behaviour

Like in the case of trust in AI predictions understanding and knowledge is the key to success. Even in trading apps gamification can improve the user experience but becomes evil when it starts affecting the user’s risk-taking and trade decisions. But what if we integrate gamified mechanisms in a learning experience e.g. to improve financial literacy or something else. And like learning about artificial intelligence’s strengths and weaknesses above, it should teach about the powers of gamification and how it affects human behaviour, see an introduction to gamification below. It obviously is powerful.

Written by
LarsGoran Bostrom©

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