A Study in Obedience: Can You Trust Anyone?

Photo taken by UNLV student Sasha McCormick

The latest Reddit Social Experiment was one that I personally participated in. During the week of April 2nd, any Reddit user who has an account over a week old could create a circle. To create a circle, you must create a key and a name for it. Once you have a circle, you can share it with whoever you want by giving them your key. Once they input your key into your circle, they get two main options. They can join your circle and increase the membership count of it, or they can betray it. When a circle is betrayed it is destroyed forever. Every user gets one circle, but can join or betray as many as they want.

       In the first day most people lost their circle with only a few people joining up. There was at most two circles that even reached above 20 members, and that wasn't anywhere close to what people wanted. The main groups began to form after the first day, in the same sense as the Button factions. Groups arose to either create the biggest circle possible, always cooperating, or to try to destroy as many as they could.  The latter faction was mostly new to the social experiment scene and they called themselves the Circular Swarm. They would swarm a circle and then betray it with an alternate account, and continue that with all the circles they could get into. By the end of the event they would adapt and threaten to betray someones circle if they didn't hand over all the keys to other circles that they had. It was in this way Circular Swarm was able to join the biggest circles, with over 200 trusted members and betray them.

       The event ended with the top 3 being considered "winners" in the community. The top circle left had 250 members, all of which were believed to be alternate accounts created by one person. The second circle was owned by the April Knights, who were formerly known as the the Knights of the Button, who had 157 members who were screened and tested before being able to join the official circle. The third place was held by a user named 'TheMentalist13' who hid his key inside of a puzzle that anyone could solve.

       These three circles shows three vastly different ways of coming up with one solution. The first groups answer to "Who can you trust?" was nobody and used his/her own efforts to reach the top. The second group used cooperation and screening to find reliable and active members to join their circles. This is the opposite of how other groups felt, as after this event most groups weren't as close, but April Knights felt even closer.  The third group used the puzzle to find those who really strived to join and cooperate as a way of screening against betrayers. These are three vastly different ways of trying to "beat" this event, and there were many others that weren't covered. Many people tried and failed other ways, and this event can be analyzed for many things. The work of the Circular Swarm can be seen as to how easily people can get data from someone given low security options, like we've recently seen with Facebook. It can be seen as how people will cooperate even when times tell them that is a bad thing. This event started out mundane, but turned out to be vastly interesting in retrospect.