A field experiment of social influence and behavioral contagion with bots on Reddit

Abstract

Recent advances in AI have heightened scholars' and policy makers' concern with social influence and behavioral contagion in online communities. We conduct a field experiment on Reddit to investigate the extent to which online users are susceptible to positive behavioral stimuli from other users and artificial agents. We let apparent human and bot accounts give symbolic awards to users with one of four rationales: praising the recipient's logical argument, emotional sensitivity, or moral integrity, or explaining that the award resulted from a random draw in a lottery. We evaluate how the different rationales for the award affect the recipients' subsequent behavior on the platform in terms of volume, impact, and content, as well as the further behavioral contagion to other users. We find that awards do not increase user activity and downstream impact, and awards from bots with the lottery rationale can in fact reduce them. Nevertheless, awards encourage direct communication between users. These findings highlight the possible resilience of online users to simple behavioral manipulation from platform algorithms and artificial agents, but not necessarily to more sophisticated schemes that simulate human conversation. Transparently labeling automated agents remains essential for ethical and effective platform governance.