Mistrust & murder & malice, oh my: The pyschology of Among Us

Photo // Steam News

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been painfully ejected from the butt of a spaceship, framed for a crime you didn’t commit. Such is the life of a seasoned Among Us player. The Mafia-style game set on a spaceship has taken quarantine by storm over the last few months, boasting over 10 million Steam downloads as of late September—not counting app downloads on Apple and Android.

If you’ve played a game or two, you might be wondering how a single Imposter can go an entire game without being discovered, or why the first person called out in the chat for faking a task is the one who gets ejected without any additional evidence. Luckily for you, psychology has some of those answers. The only thing that kept me from getting them to you sooner was playing Among Us myself.

Jumping on the “Sus” Bandwagon: What is Groupthink?

In Among Us, a group of ten players move around a spaceship, completing minigame “tasks” to fill up a task bar and win the game. The catch: anywhere from 1-3 of the players are secretly Impostors, villains whose goal is to kill other players and sabotage the ship without being discovered. Every time a dead body is found, the group calls an emergency meeting to discuss any sinister behavior and to vote off a player they think is suspicious. This can allow the group to get rid of an Imposter and potentially win the game, or accidentally vote off an innocent player and further the Imposters’ agenda.

How does a group of ten well-intentioned players manage to vote off innocent crewmates, fail to recognize the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and turn the game over to the Imposter? The answer might lie in the phenomenon of groupthink, first introduced by Yale psychologist Irving Janis in 1971. According to Janis, a group of well-meaning people can end up making bad decisions in a stressful environment because no one wants to disagree with the status quo. With the pressure on, everyone feels like they have to conform, and the group can ignore the moral consequences of their actions because they are afraid to express any doubts.

Take a game of Among Us, for instance, where a player has just been killed and the group all agrees that the blue player is the Imposter. Even if you know that the blue player is innocent, you feel like you have to conform to the group – better to go with the flow than be considered suspicious yourself. In that moment, you choose to let an innocent player get ejected from the ship, putting loyalty to the group over your own morality. That’s groupthink at work.

[Curious about historical examples of groupthink gone bad? Read what Janis had to say about the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion.]

Among Us and the Anchoring Effect

Let’s look at some simple math. A researcher gives two groups of students only five seconds to estimate the answers to one of the following math problems:

1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 * 8 = ?

8 * 7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = ?

Which group do you think estimated a larger answer?

If you said the second group, you’ve already got some insight into the anchoring effect. The anchoring effect comes into play when we over-rely on the first piece of information we receive when making a decision. In the case of the math problem above (used in a study by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1974), the students with the first problem started by multiplying 8 * 7, got 56, and with the limited time they had left, estimated a larger number as the product: 2256. The students that got the second problem had a much smaller first product to work with: 1 * 2 * 3 = 6. They estimated the product by “anchoring” the first few numbers they had as their reference point, and averaged out at 512.

In Among Us, players interpret information based on the first facts they get all the time. Take this example: a player is reported dead, and the first message in the chat accuses the green player. The second message accuses the orange player. There’s no evidence to support either claim, but inherently, you are more inclined to believe that the culprit is green just because it’s the first color being thrown out there. From then on, you process any other accusations through the “anchor” you already have: suspecting green. By the time voting comes around, there’s not enough time to come to a sure conclusion, so you just rely on the first piece of information you received, and vote green off the ship.

The Imposter, yellow, kills the black player. Photo // PC GamesN

Imposters can use the anchoring effect to their advantage and knock innocent players off the ship. If an Imposter kills someone and the red player walks in on it, the Imposter can report the body and say they saw the red player kill. Before the red player has a chance to explain themselves, the anchoring effect sets in, and the rest of the group is more likely to rely on the very first accusation and vote red out. Of course, it might only buy an Imposter a few extra rounds before discovery, but it’s a good tactic to stick around longer in the game by tapping into some psych.

Unfortunately, studying up on these phenomena can’t guarantee you a win in Among Us, but it can at least clue you in to how your fellow players might be thinking as they navigate the spaceship with you. So put on your opaque blue goggles, suit up, and hope for the best. All’s fair in love, war and intergalactic mutiny.