> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.

My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)

It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...