Via Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies
A Santa Fe Institute study looked at chains of social interactions online and it discovered that negativity online tends to spin out of control faster than positive interactions.
“The world they’ve chosen is a massive multiplayer online game called Pardus, which started in 2004 and today has some 380,00 players.
Thurner and co studied eight basic actions in which players to interact with each other. These are: communication, trade, establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack and punishment. They simply recorded the stream of actions that each player performs and then looked for patterns that occur more often than expected.
Their conclusions are straightforward to state. Thurner and co found that positive behaviour intensifies after an individual receives a positive action.
However, they also found a far more dramatic increase in negative behaviour immediately after an individual receives a negative action. “The probability of acting out negative actions is about 10 times higher if a person received a negative action at the previous timestep than if she received a positive action,” maintain a social life and quit the game because of loneliness or frustration.”
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