IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0156062.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Spreading of Social Energy: How Exposure to Positive and Negative Social News Affects Behavior

Author

Listed:
  • Ziqing Yao
  • Rongjun Yu

Abstract

Social news, unlike video games or TV programs, conveys real-life interactions. Theoretically, social news in which people help or harm each other and violate rules should influence both prosocial and violation behaviors. In two experiments, we demonstrated the spreading effects of social news in a social interaction context emphasizing social conventions and a nonsocial interaction context emphasizing moral norms. Across the two studies, the results showed that positive social news increased cooperation (decreased defection) but had no effect on cheating, whereas negative social news increased cheating but with no change in cooperation (or defection). We conclude that there is a spreading impact of positive social news in the conventional norm domain and of negative social news in the moral norm domain.

Suggested Citation

  • Ziqing Yao & Rongjun Yu, 2016. "The Spreading of Social Energy: How Exposure to Positive and Negative Social News Affects Behavior," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(6), pages 1-12, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0156062
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156062
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156062
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156062&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0156062?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lijun Yin & Ruzhen Mao & Zijun Ke, 2021. "Charity Misconduct on Public Health Issues Impairs Willingness to Offer Help," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(24), pages 1-14, December.
    2. Adam Maxwell Sparks & Daniel M T Fessler & Colin Holbrook, 2019. "Elevation, an emotion for prosocial contagion, is experienced more strongly by those with greater expectations of the cooperativeness of others," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(12), pages 1-29, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0156062. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.