Procedure

The procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pittsburgh, PRO19080070. After giving their informed consent, participants performed the CoBRA task on a bank of desktop computers in the laboratory. To enhance the social aspect of the competition, up to seven participants played the game simultaneously, in a computer room where they could not see each other’s screens but could hear the losing and winning sounds emitted by other computers.

Participants completed the three blocks without interruption, but with a reset of their position to the middle of the ranking after each block. The task took approximatively 40 minutes to complete, including the instructions, the built-in assessment of game experience, an initial training round of the snake arcade game and the three blocks of the rigged tournament. After completing the task, participants recorded their basic demographics, and filled out the NARQ and the DASS-21 depression subscale among other self-report measures. They were asked not to discuss the experiment with others after participating. The goal of the study and the rigged nature of the tournament were disclosed to them at the end of the academic semester, after data collection had been completed.