A field experiment of social influence and behavioral contagion with bots on Reddit
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 integri
Record details
Published: 1 July 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Regulation · Agents & autonomy · Finance, VC & PE
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
Related evidence
These records share source-supplied organisations, an exact publisher byline, automatic topics or regions. The reason is shown on every link; related does not mean supporting, agreeing with or verifying this record.
Pingquanqi (Equalizer): A Cross-Domain Sociotechnical Framework for Human-Agent Interaction Governance
arXiv · 25 June 2026
UR-VC: Unsupervised Robotic Value Correction for Time-Derived Progress Proxies
arXiv cs.AI · 14 July 2026
ToolAlignBench: Investigating Alignment Conflicts in Tool-Calling Enabled LLMs
arXiv · 15 July 2026
A Practical Recipe Towards Improving Sim-and-Real Correlation for VLA Evaluation
arXiv · 9 June 2026
Towards Robust Reinforcement Learning for Small-Scale Language Model Agents
HuggingFace Daily Papers · 26 July 2026
Towards Robust Reinforcement Learning for Small-Scale Language Model Agents
arXiv · 27 July 2026
How to cite this record
ethics.ai (1 July 2026), “A field experiment of social influence and behavioral contagion with bots on Reddit,” evidence record 357, https://ethics.ai/record/357 (originally published by arXiv).
Use and limitations
This page is a stable index and citation surface for a source record. ethics.ai did not author the underlying report and has not independently verified every claim. Automatic topics may be imperfect. For consequential use, quote and cite the original publisher.