It doesn’t look like a research lab in the seminar room of a medium-sized liberal arts college. A whiteboard has half-erased notes from the last class and chairs that don’t match. There is also the low hum of a heating system doing its best. It’s possible to find students playing cards in sociology class these days, which is not what you might expect.
Not poker. Not a bridge. Something with an intentional twist in the rules—a game that’s not meant to be fun, but to reveal.
Mario Molina and Mauricio Bucca, two doctoral students at Cornell, were playing President a few years ago. Most people know this card game from their college dorms. During the game, something caught their attention. Winners thought they were good at what they did. People who lost were blaming how the game was set up. That thought stuck because it was made in a friend setting where everyone knew how the game worked. Still, opinions were split almost right away along the lines of what would happen. Molina told it straight out: “If you win, you think you’re better; if you lose, you think the rules were unfair.”
A study was made out of that small observation. Together with sociologist Michael Macy at Cornell’s Social Dynamics Laboratory, they turned the idea into what they called the “Swap Game.” It is a simple card game that is purposely and openly set up to favor winners or losers, depending on the version that is being played. People were asked to rate how fair the game was, what caused the results, and how they felt about them after seven rounds. The results, which were published in Science Advances, were shocking. Winners were twice as likely as losers to say the game was fair, even when the deck was heavily stacked in their favor and losers had to give up their best cards every round.
Something makes me feel bad about reading that. It’s one thing to think that real-life people make excuses for their privilege. Seeing it happen with $5 and a deck of cards, where everyone knows the rules and the winner is clear, is a different story. The study found something they called the “Warren Buffett effect“—a pattern that suggests winners are a little less likely to say the game is fair as the rigging gets worse. It’s almost like they want the tilt to be big enough to guarantee a win but not so obvious that it makes them feel bad.
At the same time, a different kind of card game was becoming popular in sociology classes on the other side of the country. In 2012, Middlebury College students taking a sociological theory class were given a strange assignment: they had to write a response to what they were reading that wasn’t a story. Three students, who are now graduates, made a joke game called Cards Against Sociology based on the popular game Cards Against Humanity at the time. The jokes on the cards were based on Marx, Foucault, and structural power, and the humor was meant to target the more powerful, hegemonic, and privileged groups instead of putting them down, as their professor Jamie McCallum put it. Since then, the game has been improved and changed to fit different campuses. It is now used as a low-stakes way to start conversations with students that would normally make them defensive.
It seems like both games are based on the idea that sometimes the most honest way to learn about how society works is to play through a sped-up version of it. One thing that the Swap Game does better than most lectures is make inequality easy to understand. You can feel it. You answer to it. Then, ideally, you start to notice how you’re reacting and ask yourself why.
Still, it’s not clear how well the results from controlled card game studies apply to the real world of money, which is very complicated. It was something that the researchers themselves were careful about. And in college classrooms from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, there’s a sense that the games are really making a difference. Students who might not pay attention when talking about distributive justice pay a lot of attention when their sense of fairness is tested quietly, one round at a time.
For a long time, sociology has been known for showing what’s wrong with the world without fixing it. That’s not really fixed by these card games. But they are useful because they make the general personal. And in a room full of people learning how to question unfairness, that could be the whole point.
