Studying Complex Interactions in Real Time: an XMPP-based Framework for Behavioral Experiments

Abstract

The study of human behavior must take into account the social context, and real-time, networked experiments with multiple participants is one increasingly popular way to achieve this. In this paper a framework based on Python and XMPP is presented that aims to make it easy to develop such behavioral experiments. An illustrative example of how the framework can be used is also presented. This example is a real experiment, which is currently gathering data in the lab.