The Social Psychology of Alice in Borderland (今際の国のアリス): ❤️ The Jack of Hearts Game ❤️
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As a lover of Japanese horror and the hyper-digitized dystopian-world trope often found in Japanese media, you can imagine my excitement at discovering ‘Alice in Borderland’ on Netflix two years ago. Watching the first few episodes of the show, it felt like an enthralling mix of the Japanese manga/anime/movie ‘Gantz’ (which I happened to watch initially solely for Ninomiya Kazunari of the Jpop group ‘Arashi’) and ‘As the Gods Will’ (a movie starring Nijiro Murakami, the actor who plays ‘Chishiya’ within Alice in Borderland). The show presented a variety of themes that any horror and thriller fan could enjoy, from the gore and action of a deadly game of tag, to the psychological horror and betrayal of games that pit friends against each other.
From the first episode we watch as the main character Arisu, and his friends Chota and Karube, are thrown into the world of the Borderlands. We very quickly discover that those in this mysterious parallel of the real world (mostly set around Shibuya in Tokyo), must complete life or death games in order to obtain a ‘visa’ to stay in the world. The games are presented as playing cards, with a suit and number. We soon discover that there are different ‘genres’ of games depending on the suit of the card and that the number on the cards represents the level of difficulty of the game. The diamond games are games of smarts, the spade games are physical and the club games require teamwork. The heart games peak the most interest initially, particularly due to how they are described by one of the players in the first series as games of betrayal and heartbreak. Further into the series, it is clear that the heart games are essentially a form of psychological torture for the players, based around feelings of paranoia, confusion and, often, the betrayal of those closest to them.
As a person with an educational background in psychology and a lover of psychological thrillers and psychological horror, the heart games were the most exciting to witness within the show. Whilst I enjoyed the logic of the diamond games and the action and tactical approaches common to the spade games, the exploration of human psychology in situations of life, death and desperation within the show were particularly interesting to watch.
My interest was particularly peaked in the season 2 Jack of Hearts game, set in a dreary prison and following one of the more morally ambiguous characters, Chishiya. The description of the Jack of Hearts game starts simple enough, each player is wearing a collar that displays one of the card suits on the back of it. As the players cannot view the suit themselves, they must rely on other people to tell them their suit. At the end of each hour, the players must enter a prison cell and state which suit their collar is showing. If they are correct, they live to complete another round with a new suit now displayed on their collar (which they must again guess at the end of the next hour). If they are incorrect, the small bomb in their collar will explode. Following this initial explanation, one of the more optimistic players states that the game should be easy, as they can simply tell each other what each of their suits are during each round. Chishiya — the forever cynical realist — tells the other player to wait for the other shoe to drop, and it very shortly does. The Jack of Hearts is playing the game with them, and the game will only stop once the Jack of Hearts is dead. Hence, the only way to escape the game is to discover who the Jack of Hearts is, and lie to them about their suit.
The inclusion of Chishiya as a point of reference for the audience in this game was an interesting choice by the show writers, as Chishiya was not included in this game in the original manga. As an audience member, Chishiya’s observations about human nature appear to be predictions of how the game will end and his predictions, naturally, do come to fruition. As a former psychology student, I viewed it as an astute observation of social psychology theory and research in practice, just in a much, much more extreme context than our everyday lives. The Jack of Hearts game explores group dynamics, conformity and the impact of obedience to even the slightest of authority. Watching this game, you may have shook your head at the actions of the players, wondering how people could so easily give into hysteria and make such irrational decisions throughout the game. By the end of this article, however, I hope you will consider that the actions and events that played out during the game were perhaps a simple reflection of irrational, but often inevitable, human nature.
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A disclaimer on past social psychology research
Before discussing any of the research that relates to the themes explored within the show, I have to preface that there has been a fairly recent ‘replication crisis’ in psychology and social psychology experiments have been hit particularly hard by the discovery. Within science (including psychology) it is important that the findings from your experiment are able to be repeated (replicated) multiple times in order to provide evidence that your discovery was not, in simplest of terms, a fluke. Psychology, particularly social psychology, has presented some fairly confronting evidence about the nature of human beings, particularly when put into distressing or disturbing circumstances. A lot of these experiments were also conducted at a time when the ethics of the impact on people’s psyche that participating in these studies could have was not thoroughly considered. The Stanford prison experiment is a perfect example of a study that made fairly large claims (and had even larger media attention) about the nature of human behavior when given power and control, or when one is stripped of these things. However, it was rarely discussed within popular media how many issues there were with the experiment’s methodology. Essentially, it is unclear (possibly unlikely) whether the results found in this study would be found again if another researcher were to try to replicate the study.
This seems to be a problem permeating the field, as it appears a lot of ground breaking psychological findings cannot be replicated when conducted by other researchers. Furthermore, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that journals are less likely to publish a paper that has found no effect or no statistically significant results. This has resulted in many false positive results being published and quite significant concern within the field regarding how valid many previous influential studies are.
The purpose of me mentioning this prior to discussing social psychology research is not to completely discredit any of the studies I discuss but to induce some healthy skepticism! These studies present evidence of certain behaviors occurring within individuals in these specific situations, a microcosm of the complicated and fascinating outside world, similar to the specific situations we find our characters from Alice in Borderland in!
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The Dangers of Groupthink and Group Mentality
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s talk about the Jack of Hearts game.
It is established fairly early in the game that each player needs to work with and trust at least one other player in order to have someone to tell them their suit. Chishiya partners up with one other player in particular, a very smart and (I assume based on his understanding of psychology and group dynamics) very calculated move. By choosing to group with one person in particular during the game it becomes a symbiotic relationship of sorts, where it would be unwise to lie to your partner (at least early in the game) as you would then be left with no one to help you to the next round. This would most likely guarantee your survival to at least the final rounds of the game.
As soon as the game begins, one of the other players begins to form a ‘team’ who can tell each other the suit on their collar. At first glance, this appears to be a solid way to survive as long as possible, as having multiple people inform you of your suit means that they are more likely to be truthful, right? The assumption being made is that if one person were to lie (or more than one), there would be at least another person within your group who could tell you what your suit really is. Group dynamics studies unfortunately suggest something different.
Solomon Asch conducted studies on conformity within groups during the 1950’s to investigate how much impact social pressures had on people in unambiguous situations. The unambiguous situation in his study was that participants were to complete a ‘vision test’ where a line of a certain length would be presented to participants (let’s call this the target line). Participants would then be presented with three lines, labeled as A, B or C. One of these lines was very clearly the same length as the target line, and participants were asked to identify which of these three lines was the same as the target line. Seems like an easy enough task to complete correctly, however Asch raised the stakes by including multiple confederates (individuals who are aware of the study’s aims and are acting as a part of the study as though they are a participant) to answer the simple question prior to the single participant. Asch ensured that all the confederates, who answered the question in front of the participant and prior to them, chose the line that was clearly not the same length as the target line. Despite the fact that it was incorrect, more than one-third of the participants answered with the same line that the rest of the group had decided on. Follow up studies conducted by Asch found that the bigger the group, the more likely an individual was to conform to the group’s norms (in this case, their answer) and that unanimity amongst a group was particularly important for conformity. That is, the conformity of a participant would decrease in likelihood if even one of the group members dissented from the group.
If we think once again of the group established within the Jack of Hearts game, the group itself is the largest in the game, with multiple members initially. Even Chishiya finds himself ‘joining’ the group, though we never see him fully integrate himself into the circle as he continues to work mostly with one other player. When the pseudo-leader of the group informs the other members of the group that they should lie to the new group member about their suit as they are probably the Jack of Hearts, the rest of the group agrees to it. However, we only see the total agreement of the group to this decision once at least 2–3 of the group members have committed to informing the other player of the incorrect answer. Nobody descents and all of this larger group has decided to commit to this decision. They appear to have conformed to the inherent norms of the group and we see this repeated multiple times within the group, once they start targeting other group members.
You may be thinking now that perhaps it was not just the pressure of the entire group agreeing on the objectively wrong suit that influenced individuals decision to go along with misinforming (and in turn, killing) players in the game. Surely there were other factors in play, such as the fact that our pseudo-leader continually suggests that other players are the Jack of Hearts. If you were to suggest this, I would agree with you!
The first individual that they misinformed was not an original member of their group, but was a later addition who joined after he misinformed his own partner. The individual may have joined only shortly after the original group was formed, but social psychology experiments have shown it does not take long for group mentality to form and for ‘out-group’ members to be identified. What is interesting is that psychology experiments have found that placing individuals into groups based on even the most trivial things (i.e. completely arbitrarily) can cause group mentality to form and for people to start forming an idea of their ‘in-group’ and others as part of an ‘out-group’.
Tajfel (1970) conducted a number of experiments where he placed individuals into groups based on things such as the toss of a coin. This meant that the individuals placed in a group, theoretically, should have nothing in common with each other that would be important in forming a bond or group other than the simple fact that they were placed in a group together. Groups in the experiment would then be asked to distribute resources (such as money) among individuals in their group and in the ‘other’ group. In a situation like this, ignoring group dynamics, you would expect an individual to do one of the following:
- Maximize their profit by distributing all of the money to themselves or;
- Equally distribute the resources amongst all the participants.
Interestingly, when not placed within a group, individuals chose to be fair with the resources. Even more interestingly, the minute individuals were placed into their arbitrary groups, they ensured that the majority if not all of the resources were given to their in-group. That is, once an in-group and out-group was established, even for the most trivial of reasons, individuals began to discriminate against the out-group.
This may explain why even though the group were fairly unnerved by their decision to knowingly murder one of the other players initially (the newer member), the decision did not seem to weigh on them as much as their later decisions to kill group members did. This individual was not one of ‘them’ and they worked together as a group to eliminate a potential threat to ‘them’. Of course, their leader persuaded the group that this ‘out-group’ member was the Jack of Hearts that they were all aiming to eliminate, so this would have increased the ‘out-group member’ mentality and further convinced them to eliminate this individual. Which also begs the question — how much did our sociopathic leader actually influence the entire group to start their spree of betrayal and murder of their own group members?
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Anyone can be a killer: The Milgram Experiments
I hinted previously at the impact of having an authority figure within a group on group decision making, but obedience to authority can occur at both an individual or group level.
As soon as the ill-fated group was established, the player who encouraged many of the other players to form a group exerted some form of authority. It is clear from the initial formation of the group that not all players within it are equal, we can easily spot who the charismatic leader is amongst the much more timid followers. This is very common within groups, as there often becomes a hierarchy of authority, especially when decision making is involved.
The Milgram experiments (1974), which I am sure you are aware of even if you have not studied intro level psychology, presented compelling and terrifying scientific evidence on just how susceptible humans are to being told what to do. Stanley Milgram, a child of Jewish parents and an individual whose extended family had been personally impacted by the Nazi Regime during World War II, wanted to test whether individuals really did ‘just follow orders’ when put told to commit malevolent acts. Milgram had participants come into the lab under the guise of participating in a learning and memory experiment, where they would be ‘teaching’ another participant. If the participant happened to answer a question incorrectly, the teacher would need to shock the learner electrically, with the voltage increasing each time the learner got a question wrong. The learner (who was not a real individual in the experiment but a recording or confederate) would yell out in pain to the shocks, repeatedly ask the teacher to stop and would inform them of a heart problem that they had. In the room would also be an experimenter (who acted as an authority figure), who would urge the teacher to continue with the electric shocks and stated they would take responsibility if anything were to happen to the other ‘participant’. Eventually the other participant would stop responding to the shocks, implying that something had happened to them. What was horrific to discover was that a significant number of the ‘teachers’ would continue to electrically shock these confederates even beyond this point with encouragement from the experimenter. That is, even when the participant thought that the individual may be in cardiac arrest or worse from their actions, they would continue to harm the confederate under the instruction of the experimenter. Milgram found through further experiments that different variables could increase or decrease obedience to an authority, such as how legitimate the authority figure seems, politeness or awkwardness of the obeying individual and whether the authority is in the room with the person completing the task. Milgram also theorized that the obedience is partly influenced by people refusing to believe that the authority figure is malevolent and instead continuing to believe that they are a benevolent force doing something for the greater good.
We see this mirrored in the way individuals in the Jack of Hearts game group continue their obedience to their leader even when in-group members begin to be a target for betrayal. Their belief that this authority figure is simply acting for the good of the group and trying to eliminate suspicious group members in order to end the Jack of Hearts game seems to trump the possibility that they are eliminating innocent group members for no reason at all. Even once individuals begin to see that their leader may not be as benevolent as she first appeared they have difficulty disobeying her, presenting just how pervasive the effect of an authority figure can be once their power has been established.
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Naturally all of these phenomena are occurring in a situation of heightened paranoia and fear, meaning that most of these individuals’ emotion and fear centers of the brain (such as the amygdala) would have been working overtime. It has been found that strong activation of the fight or flight system (sympathetic nervous system) decreases activity in the frontal lobes (our rational, decision making centers of the brain). This would mean that whilst all of these social psychology phenomena are occurring, the part of the brain that should be rationalizing decisions and thinking about logical solutions is not working the way it should be. The individual’s main focus would have been survival by any means necessary, which is possibly what led to the very dramatic final moments of the game where all of the group members lie to each other and, as a result, all come to their demise.
Social psychology papers are always quite difficult to read because the findings often challenge our understanding of people as rational agents. However, I would argue that having an understanding of the way people can operate in these sorts of situations makes us less susceptible to falling into these traps and conducting these unhelpful and irrational behaviors. I also believe this is why we see our cool-headed Chishiya succeed in so many games. Chishiya appears to have a significant understanding of human nature and psychology, and seems to be able to keep himself calm throughout the games which leads to his success. Well, that, and a little bit of luck!
If you are interested in reading more about the studies I have mentioned, please click any of the links in the article to go to the research papers/books I have mentioned.
