In my early days in the City a popular way of determining who was to pick up the tab for a particularly expensive lunch – generally the determinant was the presence of a third particularly expensive bottle of France’s finest on the bill – was to resort to a game of spoof aka paper scissors stone. We, in our usually inebriated state, thought it was truly a game of chance and the rules were simple enough for us to comprehend. Each player, usually two, would make a shape with an outstretched hand of either paper, scissors or stone. Stone beat scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beat stone. Simple.
At chucking out time just before we left to add another brick to the fragile edifice which was the financial system you could see the occupants of table after table engaging in what looked to be a secret masonic ritual.
We thought the game was one of chance and that the odds of our winning were one in three. But, according to some new research conducted by the Zhejiang University, we were completely wrong. The scientists recruited 360 students for the experiment, dividing them into groups of six. Each competitor played 300 games of spoof against the other competitors in their allotted group. As an incentive to take the experiment seriously each player was paid in proportion to the number of games they won.
Classic game theory suggests that if the player completely randomises their selection in a way that remained unpredictable and unanticipated by their opponent, they would prevail around a third of the time. And so it transpired for those who stuck rigidly to these tactics. So far so good.
But the researchers found that in the heat of battle a different behavioural pattern started to emerge. When a player won a round they were more likely to repeat their winning selection – certainly more frequently than if they were following a completely randomised selection process – whilst the loser tended to switch to a different action, usually the next in the sequence, moving, say, from rock to paper to scissors.
So pronounced was this pattern that, so the researchers opine, players could heighten their chance of victory by anticipating these moves. This approach is known as conditional response and the scientists are girding their loins to carry out further experiments to determine whether it is a basic decision-making response or just a consequence of more fundamental neural mechanisms.
It seems then that had I realised that there was a strategy to adopt I might have been able to avoid paying all the restaurant bills. After finishing this post I will be going through my contacts book, setting up some lunches and suggesting that the winner of a best of 10 spoof game eats free. The ultimate gravy train, perhaps!
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