Generalized Reciprocity: Can Generosity Become Contagious?

每天，数百万人献血、停下来帮助被困的驾车者、参与无偿调查、评论餐厅、留下在线产品评级、在Ask.com上回答问题、为开源软件贡献代码以及编辑维基百科文章，通常是匿名的，没有社会认可或从直接回报中受益的机会。这种普遍的帮助陌生人的意愿提出了一个迷人的理论难题，具有巨大的实际意义。这个谜题的一个重要关键可能是帮助行为可以传染的可能性--人们对被帮助的反应是“把它传递给”第三个人。这种行为被称为“广义互惠”，有可能引发一系列帮助，远远超出最初的行为。广义互惠桥梁两个很大程度上断开现有的文献社会传染和利他行为。该项目整合了这两种研究传统，确定并测试了四个具体条件，预计这些条件会改变接受帮助的人将回报的可能性：群体规模、对他人普遍互惠的观察、接受帮助的其他人的数量以及其他受益者的数量。数据将从在线劳动力市场的大型现场实验中收集，并通过在传统实验室环境中进行的小组实验进行验证。研究结果将推进关于帮助行为及其传播的理论知识，以及在线研究的新方法，无论是在社会学领域还是在多个领域，包括社会心理学，行为经济学，道德哲学，计算机科学，传播学和信息科学。更广泛的影响广义互惠的潜在涟漪效应意味着，当我们帮助他人时，我们还可能通过更有效地针对过去受益者，间接帮助许多人-在线和离线-调动自愿捐款。此外，该项目还将为科学界带来实际惠益，为大型在线实地实验开发和展示一种创新方法，可用于其他广泛的决策和传播研究。

Every day, millions of people donate blood, stop to help a stranded motorist, participate in unpaid surveys, review restaurants, leave online product ratings, answer questions on Ask.com, contribute code to open-source software, and edit Wikipedia articles, often anonymously, without social recognition or opportunity to benefit from direct reciprocation. This widespread willingness to help a stranger poses a fascinating theoretical puzzle with enormous practical implications. An important key to the puzzle may be the possibility that helping behavior can be contagious--people respond to being helped by "paying it forward" to a third person. Known as "generalized reciprocity," this behavior has the potential to trigger a chain of helping that reaches far beyond the original act. Generalized reciprocity bridges two largely disconnected existing literatures on social contagion and altruistic behavior. Integrating these two research traditions, this project identifies and tests four specific conditions expected to alter the probability that a recipient of help will pay it forward: group size, observation of generalized reciprocity by others, the number of others from whom help has been received, and the number of others who will benefit. Data will be collected from a large field experiment in an online labor market and validated with a small-group experiment run in a traditional laboratory setting. The results will advance theoretical knowledge about helping behavior and its diffusion, as well as new methodologies for online research, both within sociology and across multiple fields, including social psychology, behavioral economics, moral philosophy, computer science, communication, and information science.Broader ImpactThe potential ripple effect of generalized reciprocity means that when we help others, we may also be indirectly helping many -- both online and offline -- to mobilize voluntary contributions by more effectively targeting those who have benefited in the past. In addition, the project will have practical benefits for the scientific community by developing and demonstrating an innovative method for large online field experiments that can be adapted for a wide range of other studies of decision-making and diffusion.