Playing Fair: Games on Well-Being Equity and Truth

​Dr Crispin Cooper will discuss two of his recent pieces of research:

​Whose well-being should we prioritize? We recently investigated this question with a nationally representative UK sample. Most people showed concave utility curves, implying aversion to both risk and inequality. This seems to be unrelated to political alignment, suggesting a shared human instinct for fairness in well-being that cuts across ideological boundaries – with implications for public policy, AI alignment and Effective Altruism. We’re planning a game on it next.

​How to save people from going down the conspiracy rabbit hole? Evidence suggests early intervention works best. I’ll present my educational game, Bruto’s Bullshitometer where you have to convince an NPC that the world is ruled by lizards. Previously I used another serious game to measure online echo chambers.

​Dr Crispin Cooper teaches at the School of Computer Science & Informatics, Cardiff University. He used to do transport simulations but realized you can’t simulate much transport without understanding why people go where they go, and hence what they want from life in general.