For psychology Prof. Steven Franconeri, the rise of heated political conversations was more than just noise — it was a problem in need of fixing.
Disagreement, he said, is essential to human development, but only when handled with clarity and care.
“We learn and grow by having disagreements, ones that are civil,” Franconeri said. “Disagreements have gotten a bad name these days. They get emotional, and they get irrational really quickly.”
So in February, he got to work. One psychology research study and countless iterations later, Point Taken was born.
Point Taken is a game designed to guide participants through disagreements by leveraging argument mapping, a visual approach that breaks debates into clear, written threads — all with a 10-minute learning curve.
The in-person research study, conducted on 38 individuals at Northwestern, revealed that gamified argument mapping can be effective in increasing participants’ understanding of each others’ stances and lowering their animosity toward those with opposing political beliefs.
Instead of reacting in real time, the structure forces players to write their reasons and rebuttals on tiles arranged around a central question, such as whether health insurance should be free for everyone or if cryptocurrency should be legal. Players can either play online or in-person on physical tiles.
Franconeri said writing down their ideas allows players to bypass the “brain’s limits on memory” and revisit all aspects of an argument during a disagreement.
By enabling people to dissect the logic behind each others’ arguments, he said people can pinpoint exactly where they agree and disagree, which often turns out to be “only on small issues.”
“When you give people that ability, they actually find out that they agreed at 75%, but they could never have figured that out if they were just trading words back and forth,” Franconeri said.
Since its founding, Point Taken’s team has grown to eight members, including several NU students.
Weinberg junior Maija Boelkins, who interned for Point Taken over the summer and now works for the initiative part-time, said the game works by shifting the goal of a disagreement.
“Reconciliation doesn’t have to mean everyone agrees on the same thing, but more so just understanding why someone feels the way they do and understanding that there’s a lot of nuance,” Boelkins said.
While the game began as a downloadable PDF, Franconeri enlisted SESP junior Chris Heo to lead the development of the game’s online version over the summer.
Heo said the expansion has made Point Taken “much more scalable,” as the technology presents the opportunity for additional features and AI integration.
To refine each iteration of Point Taken, Franconeri said he hosted events in the Evanston area to gather feedback, often at Sketchbook Brewing Co. on Chicago Avenue.
Boelkins said these events helped inform alterations she later worked on implementing, such as the addition of rule cards and modifying the game’s theme colors.
“All of our changes, once we started to do play testing, were a lot more higher level things, rather than tiny little details that we had stressed so much about,” Boelkins said.
Throughout these events, Franconeri said he never saw anyone “get visibly mad” playing Point Taken, which he called “a trip” given the controversial topics at hand.
Looking forward, Heo said he hopes to see Point Taken implemented in schools.
“It’s really important to teach foundational disagreement skills, argument skills in K-12,” Heo said. “That’s what I was really interested in, seeing how this could be a really useful educational tool.”
Franconeri said he hopes the game spreads through media coverage, with players helping to “get it into the hands of the people that need to be using it.”
At its core, Franconeri said Point Taken is meant to remind people that disagreements are about understanding each other, not winning.
“I firmly believe that this is one of the best ways out there to get a couple people together who are yelling at each other and think that they’re cartoon villains, and get them to understand that they’re both humans who live on the same planet, and to get past what the media and social media environment has taught them,” Franconeri said.
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— ‘Safety in numbers’: Liberal NU students discuss consensus politics, cordial disagreement
— Northwestern gifted $20 million for Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement
— Northwestern one of six institutions introducing optional ‘Dialogues’ application supplement
