Theory Games SCI

Theory Games SCI is an experimental behavioral cybersecurity platform designed to study human decision-making, attention allocation, social influence, trust propagation and cognitive behavior under uncertainty.

The environment combines phishing simulation, behavioral telemetry and propagation dynamics in order to create a controlled research environment where user interactions can be analyzed scientifically.

General Objective

Participants will receive emails that may be:

Legitimate / genuine
Suspicious
Phishing attempts
Socially influenced by other users

Your objective is to inspect the email and make a final decision based on your own analysis.

Experimental Workflow

1. Inbox

Emails are delivered to your Inbox. Some emails originate directly from the system, while others may have been forwarded or classified by other participants.

Examples:

received from system received from user as suspicious received from user as genuine received from user as phishing

These propagation mechanisms intentionally introduce social influence and ambiguity into the experimental environment.

2. Opening an Email

When you open an email:

The system registers the opening event.
The email becomes an isolated decision event.
Navigation becomes temporarily locked.
You must resolve the email before opening another one.

This isolation is intentional and necessary for preserving experimental consistency.

3. Link Inspection

You may inspect links by moving the mouse over interactive areas. The platform measures how participants distribute attention between links of different risk levels.

The platform may register:

Hover duration
Inspection sequence
Attention allocation
Verification patterns
Risk-focused exploration

This allows the platform to study how users investigate suspicious content.

4. Final Decisions

Each email must eventually be resolved through one of the available actions.

phishing suspicious genuine ignore forward genuine forward suspicious forward phishing

Forward actions propagate the email to another participant inside the experimental network.

Propagation System

Theory Games SCI includes a social propagation engine. Participants may receive emails previously classified by other users.

This mechanism allows the platform to study:

Social influence
Trust propagation
False positive amplification
False negative amplification
Collective uncertainty
Behavioral contagion
Information cascades

Behavioral Telemetry

The system records behavioral telemetry associated with each interaction.

Examples of collected events include:

opened hover_duration resolved as phishing resolved as suspicious resolved as genuine resolved as ignore resolved as forward_genuine

Telemetry is used exclusively for research, educational and scientific purposes.

Important Experimental Rules

You cannot open another email while a decision is pending.
Some emails intentionally contain deceptive elements.
Social classifications may be incorrect.
Legitimate-looking links may coexist with suspicious links.
Not all suspicious emails are necessarily phishing attempts.

Research Goals

The platform may be used to study:

Cybersecurity awareness
Trust calibration
Decision latency
Selective attention
Social propagation
Human factors in cybersecurity
Behavior under uncertainty
Game theory and influence dynamics
Behavioral telemetry

Important Notice

The platform is experimental. Some content intentionally contains ambiguity, uncertainty or deceptive characteristics in order to reproduce realistic cybersecurity decision environments.