Imitation Games and Turing Tests: New Methods for Exploring Societies

A handbook and autoethnography for the Imitation Game, a new method of social research that is the human equivalent of the Turing Test.

The Imitation Game is the human equivalent of the Turing Test. Through written responses to questions, hidden individuals and/or groups try to pass as members of groups to which they do not belong, while judges compare the responses of genuine members trying to identify the participants, assigning confidence levels to their judgments. In Imitation Games and Turing Tests, Harry Collins, Martin Hall, Robert Evans, and Martin Weinel show how to use this technique as a new research method for the social sciences. The second part of the book, which presents a more ethnographic account the development of the research method, includes extensive extracts from Collins’s work diary.

The method is based on the idea of the social group as the unit of analysis. It looks for the tacit knowledge and linguistic fluency associated with membership of a particular group. The target group may be large and diverse, such as car drivers or women, or narrowly defined, such as radio listeners or those with color blindness, or even individual researchers embedding themselves in a novel environment. The authors discuss statistical analyses of their results and whether the method requires investigators to learn to understand the cultures they are exploring.