Geoguessr: A new scientific frontier

Geoguessr: A new scientific frontier

Ever played Geoguessr? The globally recognised (and rewarded) online game in which you have to guess where you are in the world when landed in a random Google street view location? If you haven’t you should because it’s weirdly fun (and challenging unless you happen to be a geography nerd!).

But you should also play it because it might just provide us scientists with interesting insights into how people make decisions in naturalistic settings (I agree that Geoguessr is not exactly “naturalistic” but it’s probably more so than a university lab, and at least these decision-makers are intrinsically motivated!).

The really lucky thing for us, however, is that Geoguessr players like to make videos of themselves at work. In so doing, they are effectively providing us with hours and hours of data.

…looks like uh, it’s going to be Chile. It’s a big city here. It’s coastal, for sure. It’s very flat. Hard to see how green it is. Do we see any hills? That would be like the big thing to check here, I think. So, that doesn’t say the city on it. I don’t think it has an area code, but I don’t know area codes in uh, Chile.

This is very interesting because it gives us concurrent decision-making think-aloud data, sourced from a range of expertise (novices to pros), and with associated outcomes such as whether they got the decision right.

And what’s more interesting is that when listening to the real pro players (the ones who win thousands of dollars) you see them intuitively balancing their quick-fire expertise with a slower and more deliberative style of thinking. And this is exactly what is being debated right now in the scholarly world of decision-making research. Is intuitive thinking (AKA fast, unconscious, automatic, emotional, System 1) separate from deliberative (AKA slow, rational, conscious, logical, System 2)? Is deliberative thinking superior to intuitive? Is intuitive more likely to be biased? And what’s really interesting (to me at least!) — how, why, and when do you switch between the two modes of thinking?

Digging into this area of research, I’ve come across the intriguing concept of paradox theory. This construct comes from the organizational, management, and leadership literature, and is often related to what’s referred to as strategic decision-making (which implies complex and high risk). The paradox describes a tension between intuitive and deliberative thinking styles and would be evident when a decision-maker becomes aware that two (or more) potential decision outcomes are misaligned. It is in being both aware of and responding to this misalignment that the decision-maker can leverage better decision outcomes.

“…probably going to be Indonesia. Tons of coconut palms here, to our northwest. Like a West Java kind of vibe there for maybe. It’s very flat though. Okay, so I want to check out South. Can we see mountains? Not really. Kind of suspicious. What about the architecture? Definitely looks like Javanese architecture, but it’d be up here, I guess.”

So far the evidence in this space is sparse and only qualitative and for this reason, calls have been made for empirical evidence to support new models of decision-making. Lucky for us, Geoguessrs may lead us to just such evidence — providing us as it does with hundreds of narrated, complex, uncertain, and time-constrained decision challenges. All we have to do is analyse each decision using an adapted form of content analysis in order to quantify how many indicators of paradoxical cognitive there are (or are not).

So, watch this space as we become more familiar with the hectic worlds of Geoguessr pros like Radu, Blinky, Rainbolt and Zi8zag.