Making the Peers' Subjective Well-being Visible Impairs Cooperator-centered Experimental Social Networks

2025-01-04

AI Summary

This study investigates how the visibility of subjective well-being (SWB) influences the formation and stability of social networks in team cooperation. Method: Drawing on a randomized controlled experiment involving 662 participants, 50 dynamic network groups, and 15 rounds of online public goods games—comparing 25 SWB-visible versus 25 SWB-invisible conditions while controlling for reputation and wealth visibility—we examine structural network outcomes. Contribution/Results: Although SWB visibility does not affect aggregate cooperation rates, wealth, SWB levels, or overall network connectivity, it significantly reduces cooperators’ centrality: communities proliferate, transitivity declines, and the canonical “cooperator–cooperator” preferential attachment pattern reverses—under visibility, cooperators preferentially link to defectors, exacerbating network fragmentation. These findings challenge conventional theories of cooperative network formation and demonstrate the independent, structurally disruptive role of emotional state visibility in social network evolution.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Humans and AI: Teamwork, Team formation
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion

Abstract

Past experiments show that reputation or the knowledge of peers' past cooperation can enhance cooperation in human social networks. On the other hand, the knowledge of peers' wealth undermines cooperativeness, and that of peers' interconnectedness and network structure does not affect it. However, it is unknown if making peers' subjective well-being (SWB) available or visible in social networks may enhance or undermine cooperation. Therefore, we implemented online network experiments (N = 662 in 50 networked groups with 15 rounds of interactions), in which study participants cooperated with or defected against connected peers through Public Goods Game, made and cut social ties with others, and rated their SWB. We manipulated the visibility of connected peers' SWB (25 visible vs. 25 invisible SWB networked groups) while keeping the connected peers' reputation and in-game wealth visible. Results show that making the peers/ SWB visible did not alter overall cooperativeness, wealth, inter-connectedness, or SWB. In contrast, the visible SWB networked groups exhibited a higher number of communities and lower transitivity (the proportion of the cases where a peer of a peer is also a peer) than the invisible SWB networked groups. These phenomena are explained by an altered decision-making pattern in the visible SWB networks: cooperators were less likely to connect with cooperators and more likely to connect with defectors, and consequently, cooperators could not maintain their popularity or stay in the center of the networks.

Problem

• Team Cooperation
• Empathy Awareness
• Network Stability

Innovation

• Visible Well-being
• Cooperative Networks
• Social Dynamics