Last week, a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol, seeking to delay the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election. The riot failed to achieve its goal and dozens have been arrested and charged. Why have so many people risked their safety, their jobs, and stained their criminal records in order to harm others? One possible factor at play may be the contagious nature of meanness.
Spite is a puzzling human behavior. It is the act of causing harm to another without gaining any benefit for oneself. And while it's costly for everyone involved, a new study finds it's also highly contagious.
Left, Christoph Riedl, associate professor of information systems in the D'Amore-McKim School of Business and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University. Right, Rory Smead, associate professor of philosophy and Ronald L. and Linda A. Rossetti Professor of the Humanities at Northeastern's College of Social Sciences & Humanities. Northeastern University file photo.
In a document published yesterday in Nature Communications, Northeastern researchers provide a new explanation for how vicious behavior originates and spreads. Using a computational model that simulates human interactions, the researchers observed hatred spread through a dynamic network until each “agent” became spiteful and cooperation stopped altogether.
Traditionally, mathematical models of human behavior lack one important element: they are not dynamic, meaning that simulated actors do not behave like real people in real social circles. The old models were built on a randomly interacting uniform population. This kept the math simple, but made the network interactions unrealistic. The new dynamic model used in the study allows agents to choose who they associate with, just like people do in real life.
“The network structures we find in the simulation are similar to what we know human social networks look like,” he says Christoph Riddle, associate professor of information systems in the D'Amore-McKim School of Business and Khoury College of Computer Sciences and co-author of the paper. “The dynamic model is not accidental, it is essential and realistic. He seems to understand how people really behave.”
The model showed that evil agents targeted non-evil players, depleting their resources, so that evil agents looked better in comparison. This resulted in initially non-evil agents realizing they were worse off and perpetuating evil to get ahead. The researchers found that it continued to spread until there were no cooperative players left.
“Malice is a net loss for everyone, but it changes the relative ranking of individuals,” he says Rory Smead, associate professor of philosophy and Ronald L. and Linda A. Rossetti Professor of the Humanities in Northeastern's College of Social Sciences & Humanities and co-author of the paper. Zachary Fulker, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern's Network Science Institute, was the paper's lead author.
This perceived relative advantage is what makes meanness so contagious in human networks. It is also why malice thrives in politics.
“Politics is often a zero-sum game. In order for you to win, the other person has to lose,” says Smead. “Some politicians may view these political interactions as situations in which cooperation is not possible—situations in which they may be willing to pay a cost to make sure the other side suffers even more. It is these relational exchanges where malice finds a home.”
In political elections it doesn't matter how many total votes are cast, only one side gets more votes than the other. This is an environment ripe for mischief.
“If there's voter suppression and everybody's getting less votes, that's not necessarily a bad thing for me as long as I'm getting more of you,” Riedl says.
The outcome for a society infected with vice may seem bleak given how contagious this behavior can be. But understanding the obstacles that undermine collaboration can help us get closer to achieving it.
“It's an important piece in the larger puzzle of how we can all do better,” says Smead.
For media inquiriescontact media@northeastern.edu.
