An Experimental Study on “Consensus to Match” Game for Analyzing Emotional Interaction in Consensus Building Process

For “consensus building” in which more than one people come to conclude, a variety of studies has been conducted on proposals of support methods using information technology, optimization simulations, analysis of consensus building for policy, etc. While their targets were the “outside” of the person, such as the opinions, positions, and conclusions issued by the person, these studies did not cover the “inside” of an individual person, that is, the process in the head such as the reasons leading to conclusions or remarks. Although human “emotion” is involved in the process, the involvement of emotion is not properly shown, and therefore it has not been an essential proposal to support consensus building or methodology. In this study, we conducted an experiment to consider the mechanism of consensus as a basic study to find the relationship between cognition and emotion in the process of consensus building. In order to conduct the consensus-building experiment, we developed a new “consensus to match” game and used “favorability” as the emotional aspect. We had 40 participants play the “consensus to match” game in pairs. The results showed that the sense of distance to consensus differed among the participants in the same dialogue, and that the “change rate in favorability to the other person” and the “change in favorability from the other person (estimated)” increased as a whole. In addition, “change rate in favorability to the other person” was larger than “change in favorability from the other person (estimated)” as a whole.