Red button, blue button.
Everyone secretly presses a red or a blue button. Whoever presses red is safe no matter what. If at least half press blue, everyone is safe; if blue falls short of half, those who pressed blue are out. Which one would you press?
Original study
- Know Your Meme. (n.d.). Red button or blue button question. Retrieved October 4, 2026. Source
- Cadsby, C. B., & Maynes, E. (1999). Voluntary provision of threshold public goods with continuous contributions: Experimental evidence. Journal of Public Economics, 71(1), 53–73. Source
- Rapoport, A., & Eshed-Levy, D. (1989). Provision of step-level public goods: Effects of greed and fear of being gypped. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 44(3), 325–344. Source
- Skyrms, B. (2001). The stag hunt. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 75(2), 31–41. Source
- Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301. Source
Our adaptation
A thought experiment built on the viral 'red button, blue button' question, framed as a threshold public good (Cadsby and Maynes, 1999) and a stag hunt (Skyrms, 2001). Rules are stated in abstract language: pressing red is always safe; if at least half of those pressing choose blue everyone is safe, and if blue stays below half, those who pressed blue are eliminated. First the participant estimates what percentage will press blue, then chooses (button positions random, buttons also labeled in text) and marks a reason.
Differences from the original study
- Nobody is actually eliminated; pressing a button costs nothing.
- Everyone plays at their own time; the result is an accumulated crowd, not a single moment.
Measured variables
The columns of the open data file. List fields are expanded into numbered columns (for example rt_60, est_3); JSON columns contain only numbers and fixed stimulus names.
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
p | integer | Estimated percentage pressing blue (0–100). |
pick | b | r | Choice (b = blue, r = red). |
why | integer | Reason: for blue 0 to save everyone, 1 most will press blue, 2 red feels selfish, 3 other; for red 0 always safe, 1 did not trust blue, 2 if everyone presses red everyone is safe anyway, 3 other. |
blue_left | integer | Blue button was on the left (1 = yes). |
Columns present in every file (14)
row_id | string | Row code. Regenerated at random in every release; it does not identify a person and cannot be matched across releases or experiments. |
experiment | string | Short name of the experiment (URL slug). |
experiment_version | integer | Version of the answer format. For experiments whose format changed, only the current format is published. |
date | YYYY-MM-DD | YYYY-Www | YYYY-MM | Day the answer was given (Istanbul time). If fewer than 5 answers share the same day, language and device, it is coarsened to the ISO week, and to the month if that is still too few. |
date_precision | day | week | month | Precision of the date column. |
lang | tr | en | (boş) | Interface language. Language recording started in the first week of October 2026; for earlier answers it is known only in experiments whose stimuli depend on the language, and empty otherwise. |
device | desktop | mobile | tablet | (boş) | Device class reported by the browser (class only; browser details are neither stored here nor published). |
source | site | embed | Where the answer came from: the balabs site or the experiment embedded on another site. The embedding site is not published. |
mode | free | daily | challenge | race | session | (boş) | Play mode in scored experiments: free play, daily round, challenge, race room, experiment session. Empty for unscored experiments and for older answers that did not store it. |
color_vision | normal | rg | by | contrast | (boş) | In color-based experiments, the color vision mode the participant chose: normal, red-green, blue-yellow or high contrast. Stimuli are generated along different axes per mode, so compare within a mode. Empty for other experiments. |
first_play | 1 | Every row is a participant’s first play of this experiment (always 1). Replays are stored only as leaderboard scores and are not part of the open data. |
seen_before | yes | no | unsure | (boş) | Participant’s own report of whether they had seen this experiment or its known answer before (in experiments that ask). |
duration_s | number | Time from the start of the experiment to submitting the answer, in seconds (measured in the browser, 0.1 s). |
play_score | number | Leaderboard score of the first play (scored experiments; defined on the method card). Empty for unscored experiments. |
Exclusion criteria
The server requires the estimate, the choice and the reason.
- Only each participant's first answer to this experiment; replays are not included.
- Simulated rows, bots, banned and sample accounts are not included.
- Answers before 3 October 2026 are not included (the first day the open data notice was live).
Scoring
This experiment has no leaderboard score. The crowd result is whether the blue share reaches the 50% threshold among all real participants and among today's participants.
Version notes
- October 2026
The interface language (lang) started being stored with each answer; for earlier answers it is known only in experiments whose stimuli depend on the language, and empty otherwise.