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How games can make behavioural science better

Wordle, Minecraft and Scrabble are played online by millions. Gamifying experiments can make behavioural research more inclusive, rigorous and reproducible — if it’s done right.
  1. Bria Long

    1. Bria Long is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, California, USA.

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  2. Jan Simson

    1. Jan Simson is a graduate student in the Department of Statistics at LMU Munich, Germany.

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  3. Andrés Buxó-Lugo

    1. Andrés Buxó-Lugo is an assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, New York, USA.

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  4. Duane G. Watson

    1. Duane G. Watson is professor of cognitive science and of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

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  5. Samuel A. Mehr

    1. Samuel A. Mehr is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, and director of the citizen-science platform themusiclab.org.

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When US cognitive scientist Joshua Hartshorne was investigating how people around the world learn English, he needed to get tens of thousands of people to take a language test. He designed ‘Which English?’, a grammar game that presented a series of tough word problems and then guessed where in the world the player learnt the language. Participants shared their results — whether accurate or not — on social media, creating a snowball effect for recruitment. The findings, based on data from almost 670,000 people, revealed that there is a ‘critical period’ for second-language learning that extends into adolescence1.

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Nature 613, 433-436 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00065-6

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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