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).
The experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher has spent the last several years studying mutually beneficial cooperation, a core principle in both the life- and social sciences. "At every single level," he explained, "the reason the world isn't just primordial soup is because parts can come together to form wholes that can accomplish more together than they can separately."
Also involved in the project is psychology Ph.D. candidate Lucas Woodley '23, lead author on the new paper. As a Harvard undergraduate, he co-authored a book on negotiation , featuring a free hands-on curriculum for faculty and students. Its exercises proved fun and effective, but Woodley was left searching for more scalable interventions.
With the help of the Washington, D.C.-based Global Development Incubator , the Tango project team engineered a platform that presents players across the U.S. with three rounds of trivia. Some questions cover cultural terrain, advantaging either Democrats (think: who are the main characters from "Stranger Things" on Netflix?) or Republicans (see: name the family from "Duck Dynasty").
Other questions are crafted to affirm or challenge partisan beliefs. For example, Americans on the left are more likely to know that immigrants in the U.S. commit relatively few crimes . Right-leaning players know relatively few gun deaths involve assault-style weapons .
"We build in uncomfortable truths for both sides," Woodley explained. "People still left us comments saying they want to play again."
All this while, two-person teams rely on Tango's chat function to coordinate answers. As Woodley pointed out, this invites debate as well as mini celebrations of a partner's contributions. "That seems to be what makes the game so effective," he offered.
Eventually, the Tango team hopes for regularly scheduled sessions where Americans at large can join in for game night at letstango.org . Woodley envisions bargoers encountering Tango at their local watering hole. But for now, they've cooked up other creative ways of distributing a game that requires simultaneity.
The game has already reached thousands of U.S. undergraduates via rollouts at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, University of Missouri, and more. The team recently wrapped up its first trial with employees at a Fortune 500 company. And as polarization surges globally, Tango is also being customized for a variety of national contexts. Pilot testing is currently underway in Israel, with questions for India and Northern Ireland in the works.
