EAGER: Gamified Behavioral Experiments for Responsible and Secure Collaboration

About This Grant

Research security mandates are being created and implemented across multiple sectors, and this creates a need for systematic and empirical insights into how these policies affect compliance and collaboration decisions of U.S. researchers. Traditional surveys fail when probing sensitive behaviors: participants doubt the provided anonymity guarantees and tend to underreport non-compliance. This project will create a gamified behavioral experiment to establish base rates for security compliance behaviors and formulate researchers’ compliance decision-making. This approach will overcome the prevalent reluctance among researchers to participate in “Research on Research Security.” The decision rules revealed via the behavioral data in this project will enhance theoretical models of human-policy interaction, offering transferable paradigms for behavioral studies in other sensitive domains. This project will establish methodological best practices and empirical benchmarks to advance the research security field. Findings of this project will help policymakers, funding agencies, and research institutions with evidence-based insights to craft adaptive security policies that preserve scientific openness while mitigating risk. This project will also train graduate students in the field of Research on Research Security. This project will create a novel approach that combines interviews with gamified scenario-based behavioral experiments to mitigate biases in self-reported data and to advance our understanding of compliance decision-making of U.S.-based researchers. The research will begin by creating and validating a taxonomy of security-relevant collaboration scenarios through semi-structured interviews with a broad group of U.S. researchers, particularly in the AI field. The taxonomy will uncover common patterns of international research collaboration, such as sharing code or data, and generate a library of authentic scenarios. Then, these scenarios will be used in gamified behavioral experiments to establish security compliance base rates in international collaborations. The game will capture realistic trade-offs without direct questioning, enabling us to derive rigorous base rates of security-related behaviors among researchers who might otherwise withhold accurate survey responses. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.