Civility vs. incivility in online social interactions: an evolutionary approach

Angelo Antoci, Alexia Delfino (), Fabio Paglieri, Fabrizio Panebianco and Fabio Sabatini

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Evidence is growing that forms of incivility–e.g. aggressive and disrespectful behaviors, harassment, hate speech and outrageous claims–are spreading in the population of social networking sites’ (SNS) users. Online social networks such as Facebook allow users to regularly interact with known and unknown others, who can behave either politely or rudely. This leads individuals not only to learn and adopt successful strategies for using the site, but also to condition their own behavior on that of others. Using a mean field approach, we define anevolutionary game framework to analyse the dynamics of civil and uncivil ways of interaction in online social networks and their consequences for collective welfare. Agents can choose to interact with others–politely or rudely–in SNS, or to opt out from online social networks to protect themselves from incivility. We find that, when the initial share of the population of polite users reaches a critical level, civility becomes generalized if its payoff increases more than that of incivility with the spreading of politeness in online interactions. Otherwise, the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with online incivility can lead the economyto non-socially optimal stationary states

JEL-codes: C61 C73 D85 O33 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-net and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published in PLOS ONE, 1, November, 2016, 11(11), pp. e0164286. ISSN: 1932-6203

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Related works:
Journal Article: Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach (2016)
Working Paper: Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach (2016)
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