(01-18-2024, 05:00 PM)Blaine91555 Wrote: I think anything beyond what I underlined is a case of a group of like-minded researchers attempting to mold their findings to their own preconceived notions and biases.
Most of its conclusions should be tossed aside due to the fact that the subreddits attract like-minded people in the first place. Makes me wonder why they bothered, unless the intent was to confirm that like-minded people associate with one another.
Their study found that the behavior then spilled over into other subreddits where these people interacted with others.
I've noticed this in World of Warcraft. They have "channels" which are live talk (well, text talk) that initially were fairly innocuous -- people trading things and looking for others to run dungeons. It was pretty heavily moderated and there were sub-channels as well.
Then someone bought Blizzard (if I remember correctly) and decided to save money (and give it to investors) by eliminating active moderators. Without anything to hold them in check, we got trolls and misogynists and it started turning ugly. Then they made the chats "world wide" - any time you were in any city you heard all the chats from all the cities.
And it became a race for "who could be the most notorious." Most of us turned the channel off, but it was still there. If "ugly behavior" is accepted by the community (in spite of protests against it by others) then it will continue. And if it shocks people (gets a reaction) this will encourage the behavior to continue.
I've seen it in other places as well.
(01-18-2024, 08:08 PM)ArMaP Wrote: Also, if I'm not mistaken (I can't find any reference to it), someone made an experiment, with some people destroying a car with hammers and baseball bats, and soon other people joined in the destruction, showing that if we see we are not alone in doing something we are more likely to do it, even if we think it may be wrong.
Not familiar with that one, though I *am* familiar with the experiments that show people are more likely to behave politely and honestly if they've got "eyes on them"... either live people or even posters or images of an eye staring at them.
