(Press-News.org)
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.
END
Plants produce an enormous abundance of natural products. Many plant natural products are ancestry-specific and occur only in certain plant families, sometimes only in a single species. Interestingly, however, the same substances can sometimes be found in distantly related species. In most cases, however, only the end product is known and it is largely unclear how these substances are produced in plants. Ipecacuanha alkaloids occur in two distantly related plant species known as medicinal plants: in ipecac Carapichea ipecacuanha, which belongs to the gentian ...
As psychedelics gain traction as potential treatments for mental health disorders, an international study led by researchers at McGill University, Imperial College London, and the University of Exeter stands to improve the rigour and reliability of clinical research.
Up to now, psychedelic clinical trials have had what has been widely acknowledged as a critical flaw: the failure to properly account for how a person’s mindset and surroundings influence the effects of psychedelics such as MDMA and psilocybin. This gap has led to inconsistent study results, making regulatory approval more difficult.
To address this, the researchers ...
EBC-129 is an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that selectively targets a novel, tumour-specific N-glycosylated epitope found on both CEACAM5 and CEACAM6.
The expansion cohort for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) in the ongoing Phase 1 trial has completed enrolment. Notably, 82% of patients had tumours expressing the antigen at levels considered treatable with EBC-129.
EBC-129 demonstrated positive overall response rates and prolonged progression-free survival in PDAC patients that have been heavily pre-treated, including those ...
A new study in Genome Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, finds that the African Swine Fever virus, currently circulating in Europe, is not the result of a recent introduction. Instead, the virus has been present in the region since 2007. Its current dramatic spread appears to be driven largely by people within Europe traveling longer distances.
African Swine Fever virus is a highly virulent DNA virus that causes a severe hemorrhagic disease of the same name affecting both domestic pigs and wild boars. The disease is characterized by high mortality rates, leading to significant economic losses in the pork industry. According to estimates ...
The effects of artificial intelligence on adolescents are nuanced and complex, according to a report from the American Psychological Association that calls on developers to prioritize features that protect young people from exploitation, manipulation and the erosion of real-world relationships.
“AI offers new efficiencies and opportunities, yet its deeper integration into daily life requires careful consideration to ensure that AI tools are safe, especially for adolescents,” according to the report, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Adolescent Well-being: An APA ...
On the path toward a fusion power plant, stellarators are among the most promising concepts. In the future, they could generate usable energy by fusing light atomic nuclei. This reaction must take place in a plasma — a hot gas of ionized particles heated to many tens of millions of degrees Celsius. Stellarators use magnetic confinement to hold the plasma: the plasma is trapped by a complex and powerful magnetic field, floating inside a donut-shaped vacuum chamber. With Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, with support from the European fusion consortium EUROfusion, is operating the world's ...
PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, USA, 3 June 2025 – In a comprehensive Genomic Press research article, scientists have uncovered remarkable insights into how the earliest brain connections shape infant emotional development, potentially offering new ways to identify children at risk for future behavioral and emotional challenges.
The groundbreaking study, led by Dr. Yicheng Zhang and Dr. Mary L. Phillips at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, examined 95 infant-caregiver pairs using advanced brain imaging techniques. Researchers discovered that the microstructure of white matter ...
ATLANTA, Georgia, USA, 3 June 2025 – In a comprehensive Genomic Press interview published today in Psychedelics, Dr. Deanna M. Kaplan reveals how her journey from journalism student to clinical psychologist led to revolutionary advances in capturing human experiences through voice technology. As Assistant Professor at Emory University School of Medicine and Director of Health Technologies for Spiritual Health at Emory Healthcare, Dr. Kaplan has transformed how researchers understand the impact of clinical ...
HEFEI, Anhui, China, 3 June 2025 – In a comprehensive peer-reviewed Genomic Press Thought Leaders Invited Review, researchers have unveiled critical insights into how the number of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) sessions influences treatment outcomes for depression, potentially transforming clinical decision-making for one of psychiatry's most effective yet controversial treatments.
The review, published in Brain Medicine, synthesizes decades of research to address a fundamental question that has long puzzled clinicians: How many ECT sessions are optimal for treating severe depression while minimizing cognitive side effects?
"ECT is like a powerful ...
BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA, 3 June 2025 – In a comprehensive Genomic Press Interview published today, Dr. Erin E. Mauney reveals how her pioneering research brings psychedelic medicine into gastroenterology for the first time, potentially transforming treatment for millions suffering from intractable irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
The assistant professor of pediatrics at Tufts University, who maintains a research appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital, leads the first clinical trial examining psilocybin's effects on treatment-resistant IBS. Her work addresses a critical gap in medicine: the substantial population ...
