Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science discussions
Open accessAbstract
Theories of human behavior suggest that people’s decisions to join a group and their subsequent behavior are influenced by perceptions of what is socially normative. In online discussions, where unruly, harassing behavior is common, displaying community rules could reduce concerns about harassment that prevent people from joining while also influencing the behavior of those who do participate. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing announcements of community rules to large-scale online conversations in a science-discussion community with 13 million subscribers. Compared with discussions with no mention of community expectations, displaying the rules increased newcomer rule compliance by >8 percentage points and increased the participation rate of newcomers in discussions by 70% on average. Making community norms visible prevented unruly and harassing conversations by influencing how people behaved within the conversation and also by influencing who chose to join.
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- Authors
- Matias, J. N.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Matias, J. Nathan
- ORCID
- Matias, J. Nathan
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2019-04-29
- Volume
- 116
- Issue
- 20
- Pages
- 9785-9789
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC6525516
- OpenAlex
- W2943327675
- Cited by
- 208
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 41 · 2025: 43 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 27 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 7.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Social Sciences › Communication › Knowledge Management and Sharing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Expert finding and Q&A systems
- Keywords
- online harassment, social norms, community rules, online forums, group participation, rule compliance, online communities
- MeSH terms
- Harassment, Non-Sexual, Online Social Networking, Community Participation, Humans, Science, Social Norms
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