Belief updating under strategic deception: Evidence from a classroom voting game

Abstract

This paper introduces a classroom game, adapted from the television series The Traitors , that integrates six core concepts from game theory and behavioural economics into a single 25-min activity: asymmetric information, cheap talk, pooling equilibrium, Bayesian updating, information cascades, and behavioural biases. Six volunteer students are secretly assigned hidden roles as Faithfuls or Traitors, and the class must identify and banish the Traitors through iterative rounds of discussion and plurality voting. Observations from a pilot implementation are suggestive of the targeted mechanisms: pooling behaviour among Traitors, cascade-driven voting in early rounds, base rate neglect, and confirmation bias elicited by deliberately random observations planted on role cards. The paper provides a structured debrief protocol aligned to the experiential learning cycle, a round-by-round belief elicitation instrument based on proper scoring rules, a five-item pre/post concept assessment with a delayed retention option, analysis code, and a complete facilitator pack, enabling instructors to replicate the activity and to generate quantitative evidence on learning.