Abstract
Online social network platform becomes a good arena to observe generous behaviors of humans. Among various online social platforms, online games mimic real world closely and embed various social interactions between players. In online games, players show generosity each other even to strangers by donating their cyber asset generously. We focus on analyzing the generous behaviors giving items or money to lower-level strangers. In this research, we focus on analyzing random acts of kindness that resembles generous behaviors in the real world, especially donation. Using a large-scale real data from a major online game company, we find that benefiting from a generous behavior increases a player’s generosity. On the other hand, we also notice that social influence does not work effectively in case that these generous behaviors are not recognizable or visible to their friends.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ice-bucket-challenge-viral/
Barry, C.M., Wentzel, K.R.: Friend influence on prosocial behavior: The role of motivational factors and friendship characteristics. Developmental Psychology 42, 153 (2006)
Suri, S., Watts, D.J.: Cooperation and contagion in web-based, networked public goods experiments. PLoS One 6, e16836 (2011)
Starbucks Customers Break 1,000 in Pay-It-Forward Record 2013. Source: ABC News. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/12/starbucks-customersbreak-1000-in-pay-it-forward-record/
Jordan, J.J., Rand, D.G., Arbesman, S., Fowler, J.H., Christakis, N.A.: Contagion of cooperation in static and fluid social networks. PloS One 8, e66199 (2013)
Tsvetkova, M., Macy, M.W.: The Social Contagion of Generosity. PloS One 9, e87275 (2014)
Penner, L.A., Dovidio, J.F., Piliavin, J.A., Schroeder, D.A.: Prosocial behavior: Multilevel perspectives. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 56, 365–392 (2005)
Bauman, Z.: Postmodern ethics. Blackwell Oxford (1993)
Mallough, R.: An extra-large sized order of generosity. http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/an-extra-large-sized-order-of-generosity/
Memmott, M.: 55 customers pay for next car’s order at Mass. doughnut shop. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/15/202365926/55-customers-pay-for-next-cars-order-at-mass-doughnut-shop
Fudenberg, D., Rand, D.G., Dreber, A.: Slow to anger and fast to forgive: Cooperation in an uncertain world. The American Economic Review 102, 720–749 (2012)
Christakis, N.A., Fowler, J.H.: Social contagion theory: Examining dynamic social networks and human behavior. Statistics in Medicine 32, 556–577 (2013)
Jackson, M.O.: Networks and economic behavior. Annu. Rev. Econ. 1, 489–511 (2009)
Rand, D.G., Arbesman, S., Christakis, N.A.: Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 19193–19198 (2011)
Greiner, B.: Vittoria Levati, M.: Indirect reciprocity in cyclical networks: An experimental study. Journal of Economic Psychology 26, 711–731 (2005)
Fehr, E., Schmidt, K.M.: A theory of fairness, competition, and cooperation. Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, 817–868 (1999)
Bolton, G.E., Ockenfels, A.: ERC: A theory of equity, reciprocity, and competition. American Economic Review 90, 166–193 (2000)
Levine, D.K.: Modeling altruism and spitefulness in experiments. Review of Economic Dynamics 1, 593–622 (1998)
McCabe, K.A., Smith, V.L., LePore, M.: Intentionality detection and “mindreading”: Why does game form matter? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, 4404–4409 (2000)
Dufwenberg, M., Gneezy, U., Güth, W., van Damme, E.E.: An experimental test of direct and indirect reciprocity in case of complete and incomplete information. Discussion Papers, Interdisciplinary Research Project 373: Quantification and Simulation of Economic Processes (2000)
Lofgren, E.T., Fefferman, N.H.: The untapped potential of virtual game worlds to shed light on real world epidemics. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 7, 625–629 (2007)
Reimer, J.: Virtual plague spreading like wildfire in World of Warcraft. Ars Technica 21 (2005)
Keegan, B., Ahmed, M.A., Williams, D., Srivastava, J., Contractor, N.: Dark gold: statistical properties of clandestine networks in massively multiplayer online games. In: 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), pp. 201–208. IEEE (2010)
Kwon, H., Mohaisen, A., Woo, J., Kim, Y., Kim, H.K.: Crime scene reconstruction: Online gold farming network analysis. Working paper
Rutte, C., Taborsky, M.: Generalized reciprocity in rats. PLoS Biology 5, e196 (2007)
Nowak, M.A., Sigmund, K.: Evolution of indirect reciprocity. Nature 437, 1291–1298 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Woo, J., Kwak, B.I., Lim, J., Kim, H.K. (2015). Generosity as Social Contagion in Virtual Community. In: Aiello, L., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8852. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15168-7_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15167-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15168-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)