Driven by Reward but Attracted to Power: Decision-making in a novel Multiplayer Economic Game

The pursuit of power is frequently cited among the most powerful drivers of human behavior. Also, it is one of the most studied constructs in social and behavioral sciences. However, the question of how do people decide between roles that offer money, power, or both remains unclear. In this study, we developed a new experimental paradigm - a multiplayer economic game (EDMG) - to explore how individuals make choices involving financial rewards and structural, objective power. In the game, participants rotated through three roles: Proposer (access to money and moderate power), Commander (power over others' outcomes but no financial reward), and Receiver (financially rewarded but powerless). After each round, participants chose whether to keep or switch roles. Throughout, we tracked their mouse movements to study the dynamics of their decisions. Our findings show that the Proposer role, which combined both reward and influence, was the most attractive, while the purely powerful but unrewarded Commander role was rarely chosen. However, analysis of the decision dynamics have revealed that, even when they do not choose it, participants remain implicitly attracted by power. These results suggest that power influences decision-making in ways not captured by reward-based models alone. People may avoid power when it comes at a cost, but it still plays a silent role in how decisions unfold. The EDMG offers a novel way to study how social structures and individual motivations interact, opening the door to richer models of human choice.