A brief explanation of the game before you continue reading my post: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/interculture/pcat6.htm

Before we started playing the barnga game in my LFS 250 class I just thought we were playing cards, I had no idea how interesting the game was going to actually be! I only realized that each person was playing by different rules when I thought I’d won a hand yet someone else took the cards. I understand that the point of this game was to give us a sense of what it feels like for someone to be immersed in a new culture, however, I have never been to a place foreign enough to relate this game to past personal experience. I’ve been all over Canada, the US, the UK and South Africa- which are all fairly similar in terms of the language spoken, popular culture and societal norms. For me personally, the barnga game was intriguing because of the different ways people would react when they thought they’d won, yet someone else would take the cards. Some people would be passive and just let whoever took the cards take then without protest, and on the flip side others would take the cards almost maliciously- knowing that they hadn’t truly won the hand. I immediately thought of the links between this behaviour and the different personality types we learned about through the Type Focus personality assessment.

The insight I gained from this game matters because throughout my career I will have plenty of group work; understanding how, for example, introverts and extraverts interact will be of benefit to me now and throughout my life. I would be interested in doing a study to see if the extroverts tended to also be the ones who’d just take the cards, even though they knew that other people felt like they’d won the hand. Looking at it the other way, I would assume that people with a preference for introversion would be the passive ones who would just let whoever take the cards even though in their minds they won as well. Furthermore, I noticed a couple occasions where there was a dispute (albeit silent) over who had won. I wonder if the disputers both happened to have a preference for extraversion?

The connection I made between the barnga game and personality types is quite compelling to me. I’ve always been interested in psychology but this is the first time I’ve ever experienced it the same way a researcher would- in a controlled environment. In light of this experience I feel like I will be less judgemental of the way people act and perhaps more understanding because I now have a deeper understanding of how we don’t choose our personality characteristics; how people can’t help but act the way they do. To critique my observations, I’d like to point out that my classmates (introverted or extraverted) had little incentive to “fight” for the cards. Everyone knew that the class would end and it wouldn’t matter who ended up at the winner’s or loser’s table. Perhaps a better way of finding out if there actually is a tendency for the winner’s table to be mainly populated by extraverts would be if there was some sort of prize for winning and a penalty for losing.