Social influence and behavioral contagion experiment with bots on Reddit
20 days ago
- AI advances raise concerns about social influence in online communities; a field experiment on Reddit tested user susceptibility to positive behavioral stimuli from humans and bots.
- Bots and apparent human accounts gave awards with four rationales: praising logical argument, emotional sensitivity, moral integrity, or random lottery.
- Awards did not increase user activity or downstream impact; lottery rationale from bots actually reduced them.
- Awards encouraged direct communication between users.
- Findings suggest user resilience to simple manipulation but highlight risks from sophisticated schemes simulating human conversation; transparent bot labeling is essential for ethical platform governance.