Our actions are ‘contagious’
Such social influence extends to our actions too. In a pair of papers, “The Social Contagion of Generosity” and “The Social Contagion of Antisocial Behaviour”, Professor Macy looked at whether and how helpful and harmful behaviour might be spread. The papers were co-written with his student, Milena Tsvetkova (now at the Oxford Internet Institute), and published in the PLOS ONE and Sociological Science journals respectively.
“We found that you’re more likely to pass it on, both when you’re helped and when you’re harmed,” he notes. “When you help someone, you’re not just helping them, you’re also helping the people downstream. The same thing holds when you hurt someone. If people understand how their own behaviour can change others’ behaviour, they might exercise more care.”
For the paper on antisocial behaviour, 750 people were recruited to play an online game where they could earn money by completing a ten-minute task. Divided into several chains of players, each player could choose to take some money from the next player’s earnings, in effect ‘harming’ that person. All of them were also told if the person before them had harmed them in the same way.
Through this study, Professor Macy discovered that observing high levels of antisocial behaviour did not make a person more likely to harm others. If a person sees that other people are not being antisocial, on the other hand, he is also less likely to indulge in such behaviour.
The paper on generosity also uncovered the complex effects of observing helpful behaviour. When people see a few instances of others being helpful, they become more willing to help. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, when they see many other people being helpful, they become less likely to help, possibly because they think someone else will step up.
Professor Macy plans to probe more deeply into how generosity spreads. A follow up study will tease apart whether the intention to help is sufficient, or must one also benefit from it, to make the helping behaviour ‘contagious’.
Social media, social influence
His research is expanding in other directions too. In the works is a website where people can type in any cultural entity and find out the extent to which it appeals to liberals or conservatives. He is also using data from Twitter, as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble online purchases, to explore broader patterns of culture’s political polarisation.
“That’s the great thing about social media,” he muses. “Surveys give us retrospective data about independent individuals, but now we have population-scale time-stamped data on individuals and their network neighbours, in social networks of millions of people from all over the world.”
By developing statistical models that help to explain the relationship between social influence and human behaviour, Professor Macy hopes that his research will lead to further understanding in the field of social dynamics and, in effect, pay it forward.
Asian Scientist Magazine is a media partner of the Singapore Management University Office of Research.
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Copyright: SMU Office of Research. Read the original article here; Photo: Cyril Ng.
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