Despite the ongoing threat of misinformation spreading online, UC Davis cognitive scientist Seth Frey still believes in the promise of the internet as a force for political and economic empowerment. The National Science Foundation recently awarded Frey and colleagues at three other universities a $460,000 grant to study how groups create and enforce self-rule in a wide array of domains, including Frey’s focus: Reddit forums (called subreddits) and video games.
April 7, 2016 — Games that people play in the virtual world give Cuihua “Cindy” Shen a unique—and very big—window into human behavior.
Shen, an assistant professor of communication, sifts through terabytes of data from “massively multiplayer online games” like EverQuest II to study a wide range of social interactions, including networking, team performance, trust-building and economic transactions, and their real-world effects on people’s lives.
