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Geneva IMGAMEs

18 March 2014

The IMGAME project was in Switzerland from Monday 10 March to Wednesday 12 March as guests of the University of Geneva’s Confucius Institute. The visit had two main purposes: the first was to build links with colleagues in Geneva and China and the second was to run some Imitation Games that touched on the extremely topical subject of ‘Swiss-ness’. Whilst in Geneva, Harry Collins also gave a lecture to the Department of Sociology about ‘Tacit Knowledge, Interactional Expertise and the Imitation Game

The collaboration with China is a result of work done by Professor Basile Zimmermann, the Director of the Confucius Institute, and Professor Qiu Zeqi, the Director of the Center for Sociological Research and Development Studies of China (CSRDSC) in Peking University. Professor Qiu is keen to take the Imitation Game method to China and we were in Geneva to run a demonstration for him and also discuss how it could be applied in China.

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Harry and Qiu discuss the intricacies of IMGAME and survey research

We were also able to attend Professor Qiu’s impressive lecture on ‘Information technology, organization and social change in China‘ at the Graduate Institute.

Thanks to the hard work of Local Organiser Ozan Sahin and with the help of the Faculty of Humanities, we were also ran two ‘Step One’ Imitation Game sessions on the topic of Swiss-ness. The aim was to explore the extent to which Non-Swiss residents (principally B and C permit holders) were able to pretend to be Swiss nationals and vice versa.

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IMGAME fieldwork in Geneva

Although we cannot take any credit for the timing, the recent Swiss referendum on immigration has made the research extremely topical. Based on two sessions, each of 18 Players, we obtained the following results.

Swiss Judge /
Non-Swiss Pretender
Non-Swiss Judge/
Swiss Pretender
Wrong 6 6
Don’t Know 6 3
Right 6 9
Total 18 18

In other words, the aggregate result for Swiss Judges attempting to identify Non-Swiss Players was no better than chance. When the roles were reversed, Non-Swiss Judges were slightly better at detecting Pretenders but the Pass Rate was very low. Of course, the sample size is very small so we will have to wait for bigger samples in order to see how robust these results turn out to be.

Nevertheless,  we can say two things about the fieldwork. First, it provides an excellent demonstration on how the Imitation Game can be used to explore issues of social and political concern.Second, there is nothing in the results obtained so far that is inconsistent with what what the idea of interactional expertise would suggest, namely that people who have been resident in a country for some time are able learn the values and norms of that culture.