I just checked and toxic behavior in online video games continues to be a problem. At least sometimes. Game companies and community managers often combat players who call each other terrible things and tell each other to uninstall the game. This kind of community management requires expensive and cumbersome systems like reporting, banning, and karma systems. These are great and bear no substitution, but from my conversations with game developers and community managers, they’re often on the lookout for cheap, simple, and easy-to-implement solutions to supplement these approaches. I was reading through some older studies about the science of persuasion and came up with one idea that might help.
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One thing that social psychologists have come to understand about people is that when