November 13, 2025 (5:00 pm, Lecture Center 104)
The dynamics of a multiplayer online game suggests a new, integrative perspective on the functioning of societies
Multiplayer online games let us explore how we deal with uneven social exchanges of information. In the present “Slider Game,” each player sees a slider on their screen which they can manipulate with their arrow keys. The goal is for all players to get their slider on the same side as everyone else. The trick lies in how each player gets information about what the other players are doing. The only information a player gets is a continuously updating number (between 0 and 100%) indicating how much they agree with their subgroup. They sometimes fall into a “fraught” pattern where one subgroup is favoring left and another subgroup is favoring right, and nobody wants to change because everybody is getting a lot of positive local feedback. This may be a simple version of the societal phenomenon that many people today call ‘polarization’. Most groups manage to escape fraughtness, though. The question is how they do this. We studied escape from fraughtness as well as a rich array of additional behaviors which emerge under different parameter settings. Speculating, we link these behaviors to various societal conditions like polarization, free-riding, societal collapse. Our perspective might offer a much-needed integrative perspective on the causes of societal syndromes.
Whit Tabor (University of Connecticut)
Dr. Whit Tabor is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Stanford University in 1994. He is interested in how complex systems and behaviors (from language to societal structures) emerge spontaneously from the interactions of their elements, a phenomenon called self-organization, and how they change over time
