We all know that DU is a game based on it's community, which is supposed to build civilizations : cities, politics, economy etc ... Players will act according to their personal feelings and by their own means to reach their goals.
What i was wondering about, is that it could be a very good experiment to observe all the different behaviors player could have (builders, traders, warriors, diplomats ...) and their interactions, like a huge mini-world with potentially thousands of guinea pigs (us ^^') !
This kind of stuff happened in WOW when a bug just spread a contagious virus in the game that created a real plague situation (The Corrupted Blood incident), and it has been a really interesting event for people who were looking to analyze player's behavior (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident#Models_for_real-world_research).
To me, DU is an opportunity for social scientists to look for similar situations.