Experimental Study On The Information Misrepresentation In Social Decision Making

Decision making is one of the activities that have closely related with human life and it's also the important topic of social cognition. With the emergence of "bounded rationality" and the rise of "game theory", the decision making behavior on the situation of interpersonal communication gets more and more concerns. The individual's decision behavior not only depends on one's own choice to the decision strategy, but also directly depends on other's strategy and behavior that he/she chooses.Taking the undergraduates as participants, the research, through serial experiments, has verified the existence of information misrepresentation in the social decision making, and probed the effect of decision making situation, information value and personality characteristic on style of representation. The main results are as follows:(1) The pattern of the individual information misrepresentation is affected by the decision making situation. When the other is competitors rather than cooperators, the individual will have more probability to provide the false information to him/her.(2) The value of information will influence the individual's choice of the strategy. Compared with the low value information, the probability which the individual provides false information on high value information is greater.(3) The pattern of the individual's information representation is influenced by the social value orientation and decision making situation. The individual who pursues joint befit, compared with the individual who pursues private benefit, has more probability to provide truthful information to cooperators but false information to competitors.(4) The level of achievement motivation has no significant effect on information misrepresentation. No matter what the level of achievement motivation is, all individuals have more probability to provide truthful information than false information. However, when facing competitors, the individual of higher-level achievement motivation has more probability to provide false information than the individual of lower-level achievement motivation.(5) The risk-taking orientation has no significant effect on informationmisrepresentation. However, there is the contrary trend on the probability of providing different attribute of information between the risk-taker and the risk-averser. The former is easier to provide false information, but the latter has more probability to provide the truthful information to others.