CoN General Tips: Trust your Instincts

For my first CoN tip, I shall be talking about a subject which I am just figuring out myself, and that is to trust your instinct.

Before I get into how this relates to the CoN, I want you to picture something in your mind. Think of a computer with a billion terrabytes of Hard Drive, but only a few megabytes of RAM. You can store tons of stuff on it, but it might take you a long time to find you are looking for. Now replace that image with with a lump of pink flesh called the human brain, and that RAM chip is called the conscious mind.

That's exactly how the human brain works. Everything you've seen, heard, or otherwise experienced is stored in your brain for future use. The only problem is that your brain has a very hard time accessing most of it.

So how does this relate to instinct? Well enter into the equation a second RAM chip, one that can access almost the entire hard drive all at once. Let's call this second RAM chip the "Subconscious". It can access all that info, but can't tell it to the user because the main RAM, the slow one, is taking up all the processing power while the computer is active. So it sits there in the background, unable to do anything other than let out a slow trickle of relevant information.

Now the slower RAM picks up on this slow trickle; and since this trickle has the relevant info, it causes the computer to "know" where to find it, even though it can't physically locate it. So this confuses the computer, because it "knows" where to find something but it can't actually find it. It is correct, but illogical. This is instinct, "knowing" something without being able figure it out (this actually ties into my theory of why men are usually beaten by their better halves in most games, but that's a subject for another time).

The strength of this sense varies in people, some are rather weak, while some people seem to have an almost psychic like ability. The point is, all people have this sense, if they would just listen to it.

Now perhaps I have lost some people in all this metaphorical talk. Heck, I've half lost myself. So I shall move on from there into how it relates to the CoN.


All players act different in the CoN if they are a puppet. At least, that is my theory slash observation. Sometimes they are fairly obvious about it, doing everything but outright saying they are a puppet (in which case instinct is not necessary). In other cases, they may not even know they are acting differently, perhaps unconsciously choosing a slightly different tone than normal, or choosing one word over another. In any of these cases, the person is acting differently, and often the subconscious can pick up on it.

So what I'm trying to say is that you should trust your instincts. When you first start playing, they likely won't be very effective. However, as you play more rounds of the CoN, they will become more reliable. However long you have been playing, though, if your mind is sending up a red flag about another player, it is a good idea to listen.

That being said, it is not a good idea to let these feelings control your actions. It is one thing to follow your instincts, it is another to act paranoid. For one thing, instinct is not evidence. Early in the game, when there is little to go on, voting based on gut feelings is fine. Later on in the game, however, if you believe another player to be a puppet, you're going to need evidence to convince the other players (not to mention yourself). What you can do is to use those gut feelings as a start to determine what direction your investigation should go. If you end up finding something that shows the person to be a puppet, you can use your instinctual feelings as back-up evidence, particularly if you are known to be a person with good instincts.

Another thing to consider is that if you reveal early on that you have a gut feeling about a person, but have no actual evidence, is that person will likely be much more careful from then on, and will be much less likely to let something slip (if they actually are a puppet). So perhaps the wisest thing can be to keep your feelings hidden, at least early on.


That concludes my article on instinct. It turned out much longer than I thought it would be, and I hope I haven't lost anyone in all that metaphorical & theoretical talk. For those who want the short and simple summary, I say this: Trust your instinct, but don't let it control you; and be careful about revealing feelings without evidence.