The presence of homophily is frequently found as a core feature of social networks. The principle that “similarity breeds connection” results in personal networks skewed towards homogeneity along numerous demographic and interpersonal lines (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001).

Festinger argues that homophily is a direct result of social influence: beliefs are only coherent through a process of social comparison and therefore people “tend to move into groups which, in their own judgment, hold opinions which agree with their own” (Festinger, 1954). The problem of embeddedness  – that people’s attempts at purposive action are embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations – is inherent in this argument.

Reviewing the literature on social comparison, Festinger finds that individuals’ beliefs are malleable to social influence because the beliefs of others serve as guideposts in forming one’s own opinion. Foreshadowing Sunstein’s ‘law of group polarization’ (Sunstein, 1999), Festinger argues that this process of forming beliefs through social comparison is a primary driver of what he calls “social quiescence” (Festinger, 1954). This in turn serves as a driver for homophily, as people self-select out of groups unable to reach social quiescence, instead selecting into groups that more appropriately “satisfy their drive for self evaluation.”

Within the political domain, Lazarsfeld pioneered an understanding of public opinion as a process of social influence: a process driven significantly by personal conversations and everyday talk. While earlier understandings took media to be the primary source of political information and influence (Lippmann, 1922), Lazarsfeld suggests a “two-step flow” of communication: ideas and opinions may originate in media, but they flow first to opinion leaders.

What we call public opinion is then formed in a second step when these leaders disseminate information along lines of social influence. Importantly, opinion leaders generally exert greater social power than media, due to the many “psychological advantages” personal contacts have in exerting political influence (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948). These advantages include trust, conflict avoidance, and “persuasion without conviction,” e.g., the ability to actually take someone to the polls.

Perhaps most interesting for deliberative theory, however, is Lazarsfeld’s argument that “the weight of personal contacts upon opinion lies, paradoxically, in their greater casualness and non-purposiveness in political matters” (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948). In purposive political talk, individuals engage critically and intentionally, mentally prepared with “armor against influence.” Everyday talk, on the hand, catches us unprepared.

The passive exposure that comes from casual conversations presents a pervasive opportunity for powerful personal influence. We again see this argument manifest in Mutz and Mondak’s study of the workplace as a site for cross-cutting political dialogue. Workplaces may have a smaller proportion of political conversations than other settings, but the sheer volume of casual conversations makes workplaces as a key setting for political contact (Mutz, 2002).

Such public-minded talk ceased to be the sole purview of the Greek agorá long ago: when democracy is a way of living, as Dewey writes, even the most seemingly mundane sites of human interaction become critical elements of the deliberative system.

In Going to Extremes, Cass Sunstein paints a grim picture. Men are prone to a variety of serious failings, and those failings only intensify through the processes of groups. Bolstering his argument, Sunstein points to numerous studies that have revealed humanity’s flaws. Stanley Milgram, for example, demonstrated that a majority of recruited participants could be convinced to administer what they thought were dangerously high shocks to an actor who responded with increasingly dramatic expressions of pain. “What Milgram revealed,” Sunstein writes, “is that the heuristic – in favor of obedience of apparently trusted authorities – does not always work well. In real-world cases, it leads to terrible moral errors” (Sunstein, 2009).

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment similarly seems to reveal humanity’s darkness. Healthy, average participants were randomly assigned to serve as ‘prison guards’ or ‘inmates.’ Within days, the guards displayed “growing cruelty, aggression, and dehumanization,” while the prisoners – after an initial attempt at uprising – were crushed; becoming “subdued and ‘zombie-like’” (Sunstein, 2009). The simulation had grown so dire and grotesque that the experiment had to be ended early. After just 5 days. Sunstein summarizes the lessons learned from this dark look into human nature:

In pointing to the apparent normality of those involved in Nazi war crimes, Zimbardo gives a social science twist to Hannah Arendt’s claims about the ‘banality of evil.’ And in explaining what makes atrocities possible, Zimbardo places a large emphasis on deindividualization – a process by which both perpetrators and victims become essentially anonymous and are thereby transformed into a type or a role. (Sunstein, 2009)

For Sunstein, these studies highlight a deeper challenge. Human beings are embedded in a social context, and that context serves as a significant driver of individual actions and opinions. Hearing friends express a view makes a person socially inclined to express the same view. Deliberating groups tend towards extremism in the direction of the pre-deliberation median because nobody wants to take the social risk of expressing an unpopular view. College students playing prison guards give each other permission – or may even encourage each other – to act in increasingly horrific ways. We each take our cues from the social context we’re embedded in; a problematic heuristic because the signals we receive are so often morally or factually wrong.

This presents a potentially paralyzing conundrum: if your own perceptions and opinions are merely a product of your social environment, how can you ever know what is truly good or right? Sunstein offers a small prescription of hope, arguing that “many human beings are able to resist situational pressures and to engage in forms of heroism. Even when group polarization is under way, some people, some of the time, will hold fast to their convictions and stay where they are, especially if group members go in destructive or violent directions” (Sunstein, 2009). Sunstein further argues that the policy prescription of ‘checks and balances’ serves as a bulwark against polarization. Indeed, “the institutions of our Constitution reflect an implicit fear of polarization, creating a range of checks on potentially ill-considered judgments.” For example, the constitution explicitly denies the president’s power to declare war, thus ensuring that a single person can not “do so without sufficient deliberation and debate among diverse people” (Sunstein, 2009).

It is reasonable to think that checks and balances provides some protection against polarization, yet the idea of deliberation “among diverse people” is laughable coming from an era when ‘diversity’ consisted entirely of the diversity between straight, white, property-owning men in cities and straight, white, property-owning men in rural areas. This narrow notion of diversity points to a significant oversight in Sunstein’s work: he puts a lot of attention on political diversity while giving very little thought to other forms of diversity. For example, Sunstein notes that “confident people are more prone to polarization” but he gives little attention to the constant social admonishment women receive for not being confident enough (Kay & Shipman, 2014). Perhaps, then, it should not be surprising that groups with higher numbers of women perform better at a range of tasks than equal or male-dominated groups (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). This isn’t because women are smarter or better, but because women are more likely to be socialized for group problem-solving. Indeed, Woolley et al. find their result to be “largely mediated by social sensitivity,” a skill which the women in their study displayed more strongly than men. Woolley et al. further argue that “groups, like individuals, do have characteristic levels of intelligence.” People socialized for group processes, then, tend to make groups smarter while individuals socialized with the destructive features of toxic masculinity – such as over confidence in their individual perspective and brash confrontation with any form of dissent – make for less productive groups. We don’t need individualistic heroes who “hold fast to their convictions” no matter what; we need thoughtful collaborators ensure that a variety of voices are heard.

Rather than reveal the risks of deliberation, these anecdotes highlight exactly why group deliberation is needed. Sunstein argues that the Stanford Prison Experiment exposes the ‘banality of evil,’ but Arendt didn’t mean this phrase the way Sunstein interprets it: that humanity’s evil is mundane. Rather, as Arendt writes, evil “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’ (Arendt, 1963).” Evil, in its empty banality, cannot survive the rigors of reasoned thought and debate; it thrives when these habits are suppressed, when there is mere lip service hollowly lauding diversity. This is exactly why Bernard Manin argues for the normalization of debate as an essential feature of deliberation (Manin, 2005). As a political ideal, debate, isn’t about finding out whether you and I agree; it is about considering all possible reasons, all possible perspectives, and then co-creating solutions which none of us could have accomplished on our own. That is, as Dewey calls it (Dewey & Rogers, 2012), the essence of democracy as a way of living.

___

Thanks to Joshua Miller for the Arendt quote
Arendt, H. (July 24, 1963). [Letter to Gershom Scholem].

Dewey, J., & Rogers, M. L. (2012). The public and its problems: An essay in political inquiry: Penn State Press.

Kay, K., & Shipman, C. (2014). The confidence gap. The Atlantic, 14, 1-18.

Manin, B. (2005). Democratic Deliberation: Why We Should Promote Debate Rather Than Discussion. Paper presented at the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs Seminar, Princeton University.

Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Going to extremes: How like minds unite and divide: Oxford University Press.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688. doi:10.1126/science.1193147

This past weekend, I joined my civic collaborators Joshua Miller and Daniel Levine in launching the first (hopefully annual) Civic Games Contest. This is something we have been talking about for a long time – trying to tap into the inherently civic nature of games to reach something beyond a mere ‘gamification’ of civics.

Promoting the contest has proven to be an interesting challenge, though, because in my head gaming and civics are so indelibly interrelated that a ‘civics games contest’ seems obvious – indeed, it’s almost surprising there hasn’t been one already. Yet, I struggle to articulate this connection to others.

In our call for submissions we call out three specific ways in which a game’s themes might be civic:

• Personal: having moral integrity, taking responsibility for one’s actions, reflecting on one’s personal morality
• Communal: openness to dialogue, communal service (e.g., charitable work, helping neighbors), involvement in community organizations (e.g., religious institutions, social clubs)
• Political: engagement with or challenge to formal political structures (e.g., advocacy, protest, running for office, voting, revolution)

While all three of those are certainly civic themes, the connection between gaming and civics goes deeper than these examples. In his own blog post, Miller writes, “civics is fundamentally about finding ways for people [to take] an ownership-stake in their shared world.”

I am inclined to agree with that framing. Dewey writes that democracy is a way of living; a way of engaging deeply in the shared endeavor of living together. That is what civics is all about.

In theory, the task of designing effective, positive institutions could be left to experts. There are good reasons for such an approach: experts certainly have, well, expertise, and – as Walter Lippmann strongly points out – people only have so much bandwidth and interest. We can’t all be an expert in everything.

But to turn everything over to mere experts, divorced from the knowledge and experience of the people, invites catastrophic failure. James C. Scott has some of the strongest arguments against the dangers of a totalitarian state fixated on regulating everything and unrelentingly shutting out the public voice – but perhaps that framing is enough to give you an idea of the risks.

Our society is fundamentally just that – our society. It is our role and our duty as citizens to continually co-create it; together. It will not always be easy; in fact it will always be hard. But that’s what it means to live democratically.

You may ask, however, what does this all have to do with games?

Everything.

While any type of game could be civic, the connection is perhaps most clearly seen with roleplaying games (RPGs and LARPs). These games are fundamentally about co-creating a shared world. Whether characters are cooperative or antagonistic, players work together to tell and discover the story. The experience is emergent – something is created which didn’t exist before; the unique product of a shared endeavor.

These games remind us of our collective power and our individual agency. They teach us how to be citizens.

Of, course, for the contest, we’re looking for something more than a game which is civic in the way that all games are civic – but rather, a game which is self-conscious in it’s civic-ness. A game that not only builds the capacity of players to fulfill their role of citizen, but one which overtly brings this preparation to the surface.

Too often, we neglect our agency in the realm of civic engagement. We genuinely prefer to put our power into the hands of experts because we doubt our ability to see, understand, or solve our collective challenges.

A civic game, then, is one which actively seeks to support citizen players with relevant facts, values, or strategies – helping them to see or experience an injustice they hadn’t fully recognized before or empowering them as citizens: actors fully capable of having a collective impact on the world around them.