Scientists use Minecraft to study social learning

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A player's field of view in the popular video game Minecraft. ©2025 Mojang AB; TM Microsoft Corporation hide caption

A player's field of view in the popular video game Minecraft.

The recent box office smash hit Minecraft is based on a very popular video game by the same name. It's known for its block graphics, calming music that set the vibe for players to "mine" for building materials and gems. The game is very popular with children and adults alike.

One of those adults is cognitive scientist Charley Wu, who recently published a paper in the journal Nature Communicationsthat utilized Minecraft to study how people learn.

Psychologists often study two modes of learning: individual learning, which is done on your own; and social learning, which is mimicking another person.

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Until this study, researchers have studied these two modes in isolation.

To test both, Wu and his team created scenarios within the video game Minecraft for over 100 participants. These scenarios involved rewards either clustered or randomly distributed. This distribution altered how much players interacted with others and learned socially.

Sometimes it was more advantageous for a player to mimic others, as in the case of choosing to mine around the spot where a participant saw other players gathering gems on their screen.

Wu and his team created a computer model that took in what each player saw on their screen across the scenarios and predicted how individual learning works in conjunction with social learning.

The results gave a new way of looking at how these modes of learning interact.

"We show that rather than potentially one accounting for the other, that they actually strengthen, amplify one another," Wu says.

The study found that the most successful players were the most adaptive, switching between individual mining and using social learning when the situation called for it.

Natalia Vélez, a cognitive scientist at Princeton University who did not work on the study, says that the way these experiments were done was also unique.

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"Beyond what it tells us about social learning, I think it's also really important as a proof of concept for what kinds of questions we could look at using games that we couldn't using or traditional experiments," she says.

Vélez also notes that, these days, video games are incredibly popular among kids and, "interacting with each other on Minecraft servers fulfills a social need that they can't really meet anywhere else right now."

While this study doesn't weigh in on the good or bad of Minecraft, it does solidify that the format is a very relevant and helpful tool to investigate how humans learn today.

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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Erika Ryan. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Patrick Jarenwattananon. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Becky Brown were the audio engineers.