Generosity as Social Contagion in Virtual Community

Abstract

Online social network platform becomes a good arena to observe generous behaviors of humans. Among various online social platforms, online games mimic real world closely and embed various social interactions between players. In online games, players show generosity each other even to strangers by donating their cyber asset generously. We focus on analyzing the generous behaviors giving items or money to lower-level strangers. In this research, we focus on analyzing random acts of kindness that resembles generous behaviors in the real world, especially donation. Using a large-scale real data from a major online game company, we find that benefiting from a generous behavior increases a player’s generosity. On the other hand, we also notice that social influence does not work effectively in case that these generous behaviors are not recognizable or visible to their friends.