Anonymity, Social Norms, and Online Harassment Eryk Krysowski∗
James Tremewan†
September 25, 2015
Abstract We seek to explain why people tend to behave badly in anonymous environments such as online message boards: do social norms differ under anonymity, or are people simply less inclined to follow social norms when anonymous? We approach this question by eliciting social norms regarding choices in two experimental dictator games with different levels of anonymity, and estimating subjects’ willingness-to-pay to adhere to those norms. We find that for the two groups where social norms differ between treatments, people who comment online (and so are more accustomed to acting under anonymity) and females (who tend to have more negative online experiences), the change is in the opposite direction to that required to explain the lower levels of giving in the anonymous treatment: making an unfair decision is viewed as less acceptable when the dictator is unidentified. It is a large reduction in subjects’ inclination to adhere to social norms that outweighs any change in norms and drives the change in behavior. Our results suggest that online behavior is more likely to be improved by introducing measures to reduce anonymity than through attempts to alter online norms, or “netiquette”. ∗
Vienna Graduate School of Economics; Vienna Center for Experimental Economics. Email:
[email protected] † Department of Economics, University of Vienna; Vienna Center for Experimental Economics. Email:
[email protected]
1
1
Introduction
Anonymity has long been thought to encourage bad behavior, either by changing the salient norms (Reicher et al., 1995), or through reducing the subjective need to adhere to norms by dampening the effect of internal mechanisms such as guilt and shame (Zimbardo, 1969). The growing importance of the internet in everyday life has made this issue increasingly relevant as many social and economic interactions move to an anonymous online environment. Bad online behavior is driving people away from many areas of the internet, a phenomenon particularly affecting women. For example, Moor et al. 2010 found that abusive comments discouraged users from uploading content to Youtube, while Fallows (2005) report that although online activity in most areas was increasing for both genders over the period of the study, there was a 40% decline in the use of chat rooms, caused entirely by a fall in female participation. Attempts to improve online behavior through non-coercive means have followed one of two general approaches.1 Some websites try to directly influence social norms by explicitly stating the expected standards of behavior in their online community (“netiquette”). For instance, reddit.com explicitly encourages users to behave as they would without the anonymity afforded by online communication, stating: “When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself “Would I say it to the person’s face”.”2 On the other hand, numerous newspapers and blogging sites motivate people to adhere to social norms by reducing anonymity through measures such as only allowing registered users to leave comments on webpages. We address the question of which of these approaches is likely to be more successful. In our experiments, subjects play the “Dictator game”, where half the subjects are asked to divide a sum of money between themselves and another participant. In the anonymous treatment, the recipients were informed only of the amount they had been given, whereas in a second treatment they were also shown a picture of the decisionmaker and their first name. We follow Krupka and Weber (2013) (henceforth, KW) who define social norms as “jointly recognized beliefs, among members of a popu1
For a more comprehensive discussion of attempts to regulate online behavior through both
coerced and voluntary compliance, see Kiesler et al. (2012). 2 https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
2
lation, regarding the appropriateness of different behaviors”. Using their methodology, we are able to disentangle the degree to which behavior is altered under anonymity because of changes in the norms, and changes in people’s “willingness-to-pay” (WTP) to adhere to them, a measure of the psychological cost of disregarding social norms.3 We find that for two sets of subjects, those who say they leave comments on websites (who we henceforth refer to as commenters) and females, social norms regarding unfair actions do indeed change with the degree of anonymity.4 However, in both cases, the change is in the opposite direction to that required to explain the increase in unfair decisions we observe under anonymity5 : making an unfair decision is viewed as less acceptable when the dictator is unidentified. The increase in unfair offers is driven entirely by a reduction in subjects’ willingness-to-pay to adhere to the norms, which is large enough to outweigh any countervailing change in norms. We also find that commenters have significantly lower WTP than other subjects. Our results suggest that attempts to improve online behavior by changing social norms are likely to be ineffective compared to measures which reduce anonymity: first of all, people who engage online are already aware that acting badly when anonymous is not socially acceptable, and secondly, they are the very people who exhibit the smallest need to follow the prevalent norms. We chose to focus specifically on commenters because the formation of different social norms regarding anonymity requires experience in an environment where anonymity is an important factor.6 Also, given that internet experience is likely to 3
This method has been used to show the importance of social norms in explaining experimental
behavior in different framings of the dictator game (KW), the Bertrand game (Krupka et al., 2013), as well as to identify different norms in different levels of a corporate hierarchy (Burks and Krupka, 2012). G¨ achter et al. (2013) use the same method to compare the importance of social norms and social preferences in a three-person gift exchange game. 4 Evidence of the existence of different norms for otherwise similar on and off-line behavior has been found in earlier research. Biber et al. (2002) showed that most types of sexual harassment were viewed as more harassing online than face-to-face, Moor et al. (2010) identified the existence of a flaming norm (acceptability of personal insults). 5 Our result that subjects give less when the degree of anonymity is increased is in line with most of the existing literature (e.g. Frey and Bohnet, 1997; Bohnet and Frey, 1999; Koch and Normann, 2008; Franzen and Pointner, 2012). 6 For example, Chen and Wu (2013) found that people who are experienced online gamers were more likely to take advantage of anonymity to cheat in online games.
3
be a major factor in the development of such social norms, we also chose to analyse gender differences, as bad behavior online appears to be disproportionately engaged in by males and disproportionately affect females.7 Our results contrast with those of KW, who find a remarkable consistency in the WTP across treatments, and that all treatment effects are explained by changes in social norms. We are the first to show that changes in norms are not sufficient to cause a parallel change in behavior when there is a concomitant change in the WTP to adhere to those norms, or when the WTP is low. To illustrate this point, despite recognizing that unfair actions are socially less acceptable when anonymous, commenters actually give less in the anonymous treatment than the rest of the population because of an unusually low WTP to adhere to social norms when they cannot be identified. On the other hand, females, who also view making unfair decisions as socially less acceptable when the decision-maker is anonymous, exhibit a smaller decrease in fair behavior when anonymous compared to males. Unlike in our study, in the experiments examined in KW there was no a priori reason to expect a change in WTP between treatments. Thus we view our results as complementing rather than contradicting the earlier results in demonstrating the usefulness of the norm-elicitation method. The advantages of using an abstract incentivised game to investigate behavior are that we have a better understanding of the trade-offs people are making (not everybody enjoys leaving abusive comments, but everybody prefers more money to less, ceteris paribus), and we do not have the problem of dishonest responses that arises with hypothetical survey questions, especially for sensitive topics such as antinormative behavior. The disadvantage is that the abstraction means our results may not apply to the domain in which we are interested, i.e. real internet behavior. However, we find that the results of our experiment are consistent with responses to a questionnaire on internet behavior, giving us confidence in a degree of external 7
Arıcak (2009), Hong et al. (2006), and Kokkinos et al. (2014), show that males are more likely
to engage in cyber-bullying than females. In a field experiment, Meyer and Cukier (2006) found that simulated chat-room users with female names received on average 100 malicious private messages per day, compared with 3.7 for male names. Among those who approached the advocacy group Working to Halt Online Abuse for assistance after experiencing online harassment between 2000 and 2013, 70% were female (http://www.haltabuse.org/resources/stats/Cumulative2000-2013.pdf).
4
validity. Firstly, we find that it is only those who prefer to remain anonymous when online who take advantage of anonymity by giving less in the dictator game. Secondly, those subjects who comment online recognize a difference between the anonymous and picture treatments in the acceptability of making unfair decisions, whereas the others do not. The dictator game is an appropriate experimental task, as it can be representative of any situation where an individual is in a position to make a unilateral decision to be nice or nasty, and where some satisfaction is gained from the latter. Relating this to our primary domain of interest, refraining from leaving abusive comments means sacrificing the pleasure one may get from such behavior (reducing own payoff) in order to decrease the suffering of the target (increasing their payoff). As an additional methodological contribution, we elicit beliefs about dictator behavior, which provides an important robustness test of the norm elicitation procedure. These beliefs about what others actually do can be regarded as descriptive norms, as opposed to the injunctive norms elicited by the KW method, which are about what people think should be done. We find that beliefs are more closely related to behavior than norms, which shows that our two procedures are effective in distinguishing between the two types of norms.
2
Experimental Design and Procedures
This study consisted of two separate experiments, the first for eliciting dictator decisions, the second for eliciting an independent measure of social norms regarding the choices from the first experiment. The design is summarized in Table 1. Table 1: Summary of experimental design. Treatment Task 1 Task 2 Sessions Experiment 1 Experiment 2
Subjects
Anonymous
Dictator Choice
Beliefs
3
78
Picture
Dictator Choice
Beliefs
3
84
Anonymous
Norms
Beliefs
3
74
Picture
Norms
Beliefs
3
73
5
2.1
Experiment I
Experiment I consisted of two parts: the standard dictator game, followed by the elicitation of beliefs about the choices that were made in the first part. The experiment was run in two treatments: picture, where a photo of the dictator and their first name was sent to the recipient when they were informed of how much they were given; and anonymous, where neither the picture nor first name was sent. After arriving to the laboratory subjects were randomly assigned roles in the experiment: half of the subjects were dictators and the other half were recipients. In the picture treatment the dictators were photographed holding a printout of their name before they were seated.8 2.1.1
Dictator game
Each dictator made a decision as to how the A C10 they received from the experimenter would be allocated between themself and an anonymous recipient. In the picture treatment dictators were informed that at the end of the experiment the recipients would learn the dictator’s decision and see the picture which had been taken before the experiment. In the anonymous treatment it was emphasised that recipients would learn only the decision, and that the dictators identity would not be revealed to the recipients or anybody else.Recipients proceeded directly to the belief elicitation procedure. 2.1.2
Belief elicitation
In the belief elicitation part of the experiment, subjects were asked to guess the probabilities with which a dictator would choose each of the possible divisions. Recipients were explicitly told that they would not be a recipient of the dictator with whom they would be matched in order to prevent hedging. Guessing was incentivized by the following quadratic scoring rule: 8
All dictators in the picture treatment were asked to sign a form indicating that they were willing
to have their picture shown to one other participant in the experiment, and were told they could leave the experiment with a show-up fee if they objected. No subject declined to sign the form.
6
πi = 4 + 8pi −
X
p2i
i
where pi was the probability assigned to decision i. The chosen parameters meant it was possible to earn at most A C8 (for subjects who allocated all tokens to one decision and that decision was indeed made), and a minimum of A C0 (for subjects who allocated all tokens to one decision and that decision was not made).9 In order to avoid confusing subjects with the mathematical formula we used sliders as shown in Figure 8. The subjects had to allocate 100 tokens which corresponded precisely to indicating subjective probabilities of each of the 11 possible decisions. For each decision the subjects saw the monetary payoffs they would receive if that decision was actually made by the dictator with whom they were matched. In Figure 8 the subject could see that they would earn: A C7.02 if the dictator kept everything, A C4.62 if A C1 was given to the recipient, and A C1.82 otherwise. Before making their decisions, subjects completed a detailed tutorial with control questions to ensure they understood the mechanism. After the belief elicitation, both dictators and recipients learnt the payoff-relevant decision of the matched dictator and their payoff. Next, all subjects saw the final screen with the summary of payoffs. In the picture treatment the recipients saw the payoff from the dictator game along with the picture of the dictator holding a printout of their first name. In the anonymous treatment the recipients only saw the decision of the dictator, but did not learn their identity.
2.2
Experiment II
Experiment II also consisted of two parts: social norm elicitation and belief elicitation. As with Experiment I, it was run in picture and anonymous treatments. 2.2.1
Social norm elicitation
In the first part, subjects were given a detailed description of the dictator decision in either the picture or anonymous sessions of Experiment I comprising essentially 9
Risk aversion is known to distort responses to the QSR, however Harrison et al. (2013) show that
this is not a significant problem when eliciting a distribution as we are here, rather than probabilities about a binary event.
7
of the full set of instructions received by the dictators in the earlier sessions. They were asked to assess the social appropriateness of each of 11 decisions available to the dictator. The procedure used here was adapted from KW. For each of the 11 possible dictator’s decisions subjects had to assign one of four grades to describe the social appropriateness of that action: very socially inappropriate, somewhat socially inappropriate, somewhat socially appropriate, or very socially appropriate (see 9).10 One of the decisions was later randomly chosen to be payoff-relevant. The task was incentivized as follows: each subject was paid A C10 if and only if the grade assigned was identical to the modal grade among all subjects in the session.11 2.2.2
Belief elicitation
After the social norm elicitation task subjects proceeded to the belief elicitation task. This part was the same as in Experiment I except the subjects were informed that they were making guesses about the choice of a dictator from an earlier session.
2.3
Procedural details
The two experiments at the Vienna Center of Experimental Economics (VCEE). Each experiment consisted of six sessions which took place from January 9 to January 13, 2014. Our sample consisted of 309 subjects and was gender-balanced (51.77% females). At the end of each session, subjects filled out a short questionnaire. Each participant earned A C4 as a show-up fee in addition to the money earned for making decisions. The average earnings were A C13,37 per person.
3
Hypotheses
We have three types of hypotheses. The first tests to see whether we replicate the common finding that greater anonymity leads to dictators giving less. 10
We deliberately used very different graphical interfaces for eliciting norms and beliefs to minimize
any potential order effect. We believe that any order effect caused by eliciting norms first would most likely increase the similarity in the shapes of the two measures, so the differences we find between them can be viewed as a lower bound. 11 See KW for an explanation of how this incentivization mechanism is effective in eliciting social norms.
8
Hypothesis 1 Dictators give less in the anonymous treatment than in the picture treatment. Assuming such a result is found, we test whether this may be caused by a change in social norms, with subjects regarding bad behavior as more acceptable in anonymous environments. Hypothesis 2 Subjects report unfair divisions as more socially acceptable in the anonymous treatment than in the picture treatment. The other possible explanation is that people feel less need to adhere to social norms when they are anonymous. To test this we estimate the amount subjects are willing to pay to take more socially acceptable actions, using the model described in KW. It is assumed that a decision maker cares about both the monetary payoff related to an action and the degree to which the action is collectively perceived to be acceptable. More precisely, the utility function is assumed to be of the form: u(ak ) = π(ak ) + βN (ak ) where π(ak ) is the profit yielded from choosing action ak and β represents the importance the individual attributes to the socially perceived appropriateness of that action, N (ak ). The values of N (ak ) are measured by the average appropriateness rating elicited in Experiment II for each action. The parameters π and β are estimated using a conditional logit, after which the willingness to pay to change from a very socially unacceptable choice to a very socially acceptable choice can then be estimated as 3β. Hypothesis 3 Subjects have a lower willingness to pay to go from a very socially unacceptable choice to a very socially acceptable choice in the anonymous treatment than in the picture treatment. To investigate the idea that people may develop different attitudes to anonymity as a result of exposure to online communities, we divide the subject pool according to their response to the question “Do you ever leave comments on web pages (e.g. news sites, review sites, or blogs)?” We label those who respond in the affirmative as 9
commenters, and the rest as non-commenters. We also pay attention to gender, as online abuse is found to be disproportionately engaged in by males and disproportionately affect females. Accordingly, each hypothesis is tested separately for commenters, non-commenters, males, and females.
4
Results
We examine each of our hypotheses in turn. Section 4.1 reports data and tests regarding decisions in the Dictator games, section 4.2 the results of the social norm elicitation, and section 4.3 the estimates of subjects’ WTP to adhere to social norms. These results are summarized in Table 2. Finally, in section 4.4 we analyse the results of the belief elicitation. Table 2: Summary of Results. Commenters Non-commenters
Female
Male
Full Sample
Amount shared (Picture)
3.78
3.96
3.68
4.29
3.88
Amount shared (Anon)
1.8
2.42
2.41
1.88
2.18
-1.98***
-1.54***
-1.27***
-2.41***
-1.70**
Acceptability (Picture)
2.6
2.26
2.43
2.36
2.4
Acceptability (Anon)
2.16
2.23
2.1
2.31
2.2
∆ Acceptability
-0.44**
-0.03
-0.33**
-0.05
-0.2
WTP (Picture)
5.93
7.66
6.8
6.05
6.82
WTP (Anon)
3.86
5.51
5.8
5.15
5.11
-2.07**
-2.15***
-1.0
-0.9
-1.71***
∆ Amount shared
∆ WTP
4.1
Dictator decisions
Figure 1 displays the data from both treatments separately for commenters and noncommenters, while Figure 1 disaggregates by gender. The correlation between commenting and gender is negligible and insignificant (r = 0.0383, p = 0.502), so differences we find between commenters and non-commenters are unrelated to gender and vice-versa.
10
Mann-Whitney tests identify significant treatment differences in distributions of the amount shared in all four sub-samples: commenters (¯ xpict = 3.78, x¯anon = 1.8, p < 0.01), non-commenters (¯ xpict = 3.96, x¯anon = 2.42, p < 0.01), females (¯ xpict = 3.68, x¯anon = 2.41, p < 0.01), and males (¯ xpict = 4.29, x¯anon = 1.88, p = 0.018). These results are summarized in Table 2. Stochastic inequality tests show that commenters (p < 0.1), non-commenters (p < 0.05?) and males (p < 0.01) give less when anonymous, and the direction of the change is supported for all four sub-samples in the regressions in Table 3. There is no significant difference between commenters and non-commenters, or males and females, if one considers within-treatment comparisons.
Figure 1: Distribution of dictators‘ choices across treatments and commenting habits. Comparing the treatment effects across sub-samples, the difference between the average amount shared in the anonymity and picture treatments is greater for commenters than non-commenters (1.98 vs. 1.54), and almost twice as large for males than females (2.41 vs. 1.27). To test whether these differences are significant we ran the OLS regressions reported in Table 3. The first column shows the outcomes of the regression of the amount shared by dictators on a dummy indicating the anonymous treatment, and confirms the significant treatment effect found with the non11
Figure 2: Distribution of dictators‘ choices across treatments and genders. parametric tests. The second column includes a dummy for commenters and the interaction effect with the treatment dummy. The coefficient on the interaction term is not significant, indicating that the treatment effects for commenters and not-commenters are not statistically different. The equivalent regression with a dummy for males shown in the third column finds no statistical difference in the the treatment effects between males and females. Finally, we test the external validity of our experiment by looking to see whether the people who take advantage of anonymity online are the same as those who do likewise in the laboratory. The final regression uses a dummy variable, which takes value one for subjects who answer “yes” to the following question: “Do you prefer to comment content on the internet anonymously (when possible)?” We also include its interaction with the treatment dummy. Remarkably, the treatment effect is driven purely by participants who prefer to be anonymous online. The treatment effect for those who say they do not prefer to comment anonymously is around one fifth the size compared to all previously estimated treatment effects (-0.268), and is no longer statistically significant. Those who do prefer to comment anonymously online give significantly more than the others in the picture treatment, but significantly less than
12
the others in the anonymity treatment, resulting in a large and statistically significant treatment effect.
4.2
Social Norms
The assessments of acceptability of different choices in the dictator game were given numerical values from 1, which means ”this action is very socially unacceptable” to 4, which means ”this action is very socially acceptable”. Results treating each of the eleven choices separately can be found in the appendix in table 4. The Mann-Whitney test finds the distributions of elicited norms to be significantly different between treatments among commenters for giving between one and four tokens, and among females for giving between two and four tokens.12 There are no treatment differences for non-commenters or males. The stochastic inequality test fails to identify any significant differences, however ordered probits find identical levels of significance as the Mann-Whitney tests and show that in each case the difference is in the direction of the actions being seen as less appropriate under anonymity.13 As a concise summary of this data, we report in Table 2 the average rating for “unfair” divisions, i.e. choices where the recipient is given less than half of the dictator’s endowment. Again we find significant treatment differences in the distributions of these ratings only for commenters and females with both groups finding unfair decisions less appropriate under anonymity, as compared to when the dictator is identified.
4.3
Willingness to pay to adhere to social norms
The estimated willingness to pay (WTP) of subjects to move from the least appropriate to the most appropriate action in the different treatments, along with standard errors, are shown in Figure . The conditional logit regressions on which these are based, as explained in Section 3, are reported in Table 5. Looking separately at commenters and non-commenters we can see that for the former anonymity significantly reduces WTP from A C5.93 to A C3.86 (p = 0.02) and for 12 13
Results treating each of the eleven choices separately can be found in the appendix in table 4. The results of the ordered probits are available from the authors on request.
13
Table 3: Ordinary least square regression of amount shared with recipient. (1) (2) (3) (4) Anonymous
-1.701***
-1.542***
-2.403***
-0.268
(0.432)
(0.564)
(0.703)
(0.690)
Commenter
-0.181 (0.610)
Anonymous*Commenter
-0.436 (0.886)
Female
-0.607 (0.637)
Anonymous*Female
1.134 (0.895)
PreferAnon
1.221** (0.599)
Anonymous*PreferAnon
-2.278** (0.868)
Constant
Observations R-squared
3.881***
3.958***
4.286***
3.125***
(0.300)
(0.399)
(0.520)
(0.471)
81
81
81
81
0.164
0.175
0.181
0.234
Standard errors in parentheses *** p
