(86A) Another day, another group
By Onno Hansen-Staszyński | Last Updated: 11 December 2025
Today, we repeated yesterday’s workshop (see blog post eighty-six), but with a cohort two years older. In this older group, quite a few students experienced moral scruples while playing the Bad News game. These are their answers:
· Sometimes the criticism, or rather the persuasions, of the leading bot could be a bit uncomfortable.
· I think nothing was uncomfortable.
· The uncomfortable moments were when I chose an answer and the game was persuading me to choose the worse one. That’s because I am very honest and I can’t lie.
· It was uncomfortable that I could only choose between answers that were both contrary to my beliefs.
· It was difficult and uncomfortable to pretend to be the bad one and choose between answers I didn’t agree with.
· Nothing was uncomfortable.
· Few options to choose from, or sometimes a lack of options, or sometimes a lack of them, and I had to select what the game required of me.
· A sense of such morality and righteousness. It was uncomfortable to do it against my own will/beliefs.
More differences
The differing responses to the Bad News game were not the only difference between the groups. In a subsequent task (finding and confidently presenting debunks of the Doppelganger campaign) the younger group excelled, demonstrating competence, while the older group struggled.
My hypotheses
Naturally, it is tempting to claim that the difference stems from two years of experiencing our specific form of education: two years in which their authenticity was facilitated to shine through more clearly, both regarding resistance to external expectations and pressure and openness about their weaknesses and uncertainties.
But the difference might just as well be caused by the difference between generations in which the younger generation is more desensitized to external challenges and rather goes with the flow. This hypothesis is reinforced by an observation we’ve made repeatedly: the lifespan of a pedagogy appears to be dramatically shrinking. Instead of spanning a traditional fifteen-year generational period, we find that our didactic strategies only hold relevance for approximately three years. After this narrow window, a seemingly ‘new generation’ emerges, necessitating a complete revamping of our concrete educational approach – not our basics.
A third option, naturally, is that the sample sizes are too small to conclude anything with a hint of certainty.
To me, today’s and yesterday’s observations reflect the state of wonder that I experience in the classroom every time. That is what I try to share in the last blogs. Consider these observations an invitation to wonder alongside me.
PS
Could there be an inverted relation between affective empathy and ‘cold’ online cognition? The core idea could then be this. The online environment provides an impoverished human experience. Cold cognition thrives because it can fill the missing parts with projection; affective empathy struggles because important clues are missing.
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