Jun 3, 2025 06:37 PM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1085946
INTRO: Algorithmically-driven social media has split red and blue America into separate information environments. But a new online tool, developed at Harvard, can bring citizens back together.
The virtual quiz game Tango pairs Democrats and Republicans on common teams, where bipartisanship quickly emerges as their competitive superpower. “It’s really the opposite of the nasty, divisive posting you find on social media,” offered Tango co-creator Joshua D. Greene, a professor of psychology and co-author of new study measuring the game’s impact.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, showed decreased negative partisanship with increased warmth and even financial generosity between nearly 5,000 U.S. players from opposing political parties. The effect was comparable, the researchers wrote, to rolling back approximately 15 years of rising polarization in American political life.
In one of the experiments, Democrats and Republicans were given $100 to allot as they like. Those who had teamed up with a political rival proved far more generous with members of the opposing party. What’s more, the changes proved long-lasting across all five experiments after just one hour of gameplay.
“We see over and over again that the effects last at least a month and often up to four months from playing just once,” reported Greene, author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them”(2013)...... (MORE - missing details, no ads)
INTRO: Algorithmically-driven social media has split red and blue America into separate information environments. But a new online tool, developed at Harvard, can bring citizens back together.
The virtual quiz game Tango pairs Democrats and Republicans on common teams, where bipartisanship quickly emerges as their competitive superpower. “It’s really the opposite of the nasty, divisive posting you find on social media,” offered Tango co-creator Joshua D. Greene, a professor of psychology and co-author of new study measuring the game’s impact.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, showed decreased negative partisanship with increased warmth and even financial generosity between nearly 5,000 U.S. players from opposing political parties. The effect was comparable, the researchers wrote, to rolling back approximately 15 years of rising polarization in American political life.
In one of the experiments, Democrats and Republicans were given $100 to allot as they like. Those who had teamed up with a political rival proved far more generous with members of the opposing party. What’s more, the changes proved long-lasting across all five experiments after just one hour of gameplay.
“We see over and over again that the effects last at least a month and often up to four months from playing just once,” reported Greene, author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them”(2013)...... (MORE - missing details, no ads)