How Perceived Complexity Impacts on Comfort Zones in Social Decision Contexts—Combining Gamification and Simulation for Assessment

Abstract

This paper is about the ambiguous love-hate relationship people have with complexity in social decision contexts: There seems to be a tipping point where increasing complexity seen as exciting and satisfying turns to overwhelming and annoying nuisance. People tend to have an intuitive understanding about what constitutes a complex situation. The paper investigates this intuition to find out more about complexity in a bottom-up approach where a complexity definition would emerge from people’s intersubjective understanding. It therefore looks for the relation between a subjective feeling individual people might arbitrarily share with others by chance, and objective, measurable features underlying a decision situation. The paper combines gamification and simulation to address these questions. By increasing complexity in a gamified social decision situation, empirical data is generated about people’s complexity intuitions. The empirical games are then simulated—calibrated by the gamification setting for producing artificial data. The analysis compares the ratings of perceived complexity and satisfaction in empirical games with a set of metrics derived from the simulations. Correlations between participants’ ratings and simulation metrics provide insights into the complexity experience: Sentiments about complexity may be related to objective features that enable a bottom-up definition of measurable social complexity.