Contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior among peers and the role of social proximity
By Eugen Dimant. Journal of Economic Psychology, 2019
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that anti-social behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also find that social proximity amplifies the contagion of anti-social behavior more strongly than the contagion of pro-social behavior. Anti-social individuals are also most susceptible to the behavioral contagion of other anti-social peers. These findings paired with the methodological contribution inform the design of effective norm-based policy interventions directed at facilitating pro-social behavior and reducing anti-social behavior in social and economic environments.
Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e180a8350fddd70f5d6bf9ba2c3610cd6b87c9a
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty (2020, unknown): “…(e.g., Shalvi et al., 2011; Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013 ) or other related tasks capturing deviant behavior (e.g., Buckenmaier et al., 2019; Dimant, 2019 , for an overview see also Abeler et al., 2019; Gerlach et al., 2019; Köbis et al., 2019 ) has the methodological advantage that…”
- Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050 (2020, background): “For this reason, a cumulation of effects due to social contagion, repetitive nudging, or direct intervention can lead to social tipping dynamics (48).”
- The importance of belonging and the avoidance of social risk taking in adolescence (2021, background): “…research has suggested that adults are more likely to conform to selfish others than to prosocial others (‘opportunistic conformity’ (Charness, Naef, & Sontuoso, 2019; Croson & Shang, 2008; Dimant, 2019)), we observed no evidence of such an asymmetry in social influence in young to midadolescents.”