At the Go club, some-one asked about using red, green, and blue stones instead of using black and white. The chap who is doing a PhD in game theory said: the two weakest players will gang up on the strongest player, *just like any truel".

I was surprised by the way he spoke immediately without being distracted from his own game. Study long enough and hard enough and it becomes automatic: gang up on the stronger.

Now humans have an intuitive grasp of social games, which raises the question: what would that algorithm feel like from the inside? Perhaps it gets expressed as sympathy for the underdog?

It might be possible to test this hypothesis. A truel is a three player game that turns into a duel after one player has been eliminated. That is why you side with the weaker of your two opponents. The experimental psychologist setting up his experiment can manipulate the framing. It the game theory idea is correct, sympathy for the underdog should be stronger when the framing primes the idea of a follow on duel.

For example if you frame America versus bin Laden as the battle of two totalising ideologies, will the world be dog-eat-dog Capitalist or beard-and-burka Islamic, that should boost underdog-sympathy. If you frame America versus bin Laden as pure tragedy, "Americans just want to stay at home eating, bin Laden really wanted to stay in Mecca praying, how came they ended up fighting?", that should weaken underdog sympathy.

I'm not sure how to set up such an experiment. May it could be presented as research into writing dialogue for the theatre. The experimental subject is presented with scripts for plays. In one play the quarreling characters see rivals they are discussing (e.g. Israel v Palestine, etc) as expansionist, in another play the quarreling characters see the rivals they are discussing as fated to fight then go home. The experimental subject is probed with various lines of dialogue for the characters, which either sympathise with the underdog or the overdog, and asked to judge which seems natural.

The hypothesis is that it is the characters that anticipate a follow on duel whose dialogue feels natural with sympathy for the underdog.