Anonymous Strangers Research Articles

Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks

In this paper Professor Strahilevitz addresses the question of why individual members of peer-to-peer file-swapping networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa consciously choose to share their unlicensed copies of copyrighted content with anonymous strangers despite the absence of economic incentives for doing so. Rational choice theorists and many social psychologists ordinarily expect that in the absence of face-to-face contact or other communication, strangers who expect neither to engage in repeat-player interactions nor to be sanctioned for free-riding will be unlikely to contribute to a public good if such cooperation is somewhat costly. Yet Strahilevitz's study found that a majority of those users who downloaded songs from the MusicCity/Kazaa network shared at least some portions of their music collections with anonymous peers, despite an absence of face-to-face contact and a near absence of other user-to-user communication and repeat-player interactions. Previous research has suggested that many of these users do incur real costs in order to share their content. Strahilevitz attributes this cooperative behavior in part to the file-swapping networks' code. Charismatic code is a technology that presents each member of a group with a distorted picture of his fellow group members by magnifying cooperative behavior and masking uncooperative behavior. Strahilevitz argues that users who are exposed to charismatic code and benefit from other users' contributions to these networks are likely to mimic the cooperative behavior they observe. The social norm of reciprocity can therefore engender surprisingly robust cooperation in environments that are characterized by fleeting interactions among anonymous individuals. Strahilevitz concludes that cooperative uploading is nevertheless the weak link in peer-to-peer file transfers, observing that strategies that magnify the prevalence of free-riding or otherwise diminish users' impulse to upload present attractive possibilities for curtailing copyright infringement on the Internet.

Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks

In this paper Professor Strahilevitz addresses the question of why individual members of peer-to-peer file-swapping networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa consciously choose to share their unlicensed copies of copyrighted content with anonymous strangers despite the absence of economic incentives for doing so. Rational choice theorists and many social psychologists ordinarily expect that in the absence of face-to-face contact or other communication, strangers who expect neither to engage in repeat-player interactions nor to be sanctioned for free-riding will be unlikely to contribute to a public good if such cooperation is somewhat costly. Yet Strahilevitz's study found that a majority of those users who downloaded songs from the MusicCity/Kazaa network shared at least some portions of their music collections with anonymous peers, despite an absence of face-to-face contact and a near absence of other user-to-user communication and repeat-player interactions. Previous research has suggested that many of these users do incur real costs in order to share their content. Strahilevitz attributes this cooperative behavior in part to the file-swapping networks' code. Charismatic code is a technology that presents each member of a group with a distorted picture of his fellow group members by magnifying cooperative behavior and masking uncooperative behavior. Strahilevitz argues that users who are exposed to charismatic code and benefit from other users' contributions to these networks are likely to mimic the cooperative behavior they observe. The social norm of reciprocity can therefore engender surprisingly robust cooperation in environments that are characterized by fleeting interactions among anonymous individuals. Strahilevitz concludes that cooperative uploading is nevertheless the weak link in peer-to-peer file transfers, observing that strategies that magnify the prevalence of free-riding or otherwise diminish users' impulse to upload present attractive possibilities for curtailing copyright infringement on the Internet.

A Comparison of the Roles of the “Sociological Stranger” and the “Anonymous Stranger” in Field Research

A Comparison of the Roles of the “Sociological Stranger” and the “Anonymous Stranger” in Field Research

Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of law-adhering and law-violating contexts on subject-behavior in a potentially law-violating situation in which the probability of negative sanctions was slight. Observations were made on subjects who had to make a decision either to violate or to adhere to a “Don't-Walk” signal at the intersection with sparse traffic. The three specific conditions included the control-condition in which no model was present and the experimental conditions in which an anonymous male stranger, the experimenter's confederate, acted either as a law-adhering model or as a law-violating model. The presence of a law-adhering model significantly increases the rate of pedestrian-adherence to a minor legal restriction on the part of both males and females. After the ceiling effects arising from the design of the experiment were factored out, the results showed that a law-violating model has greater influence on subject-behavior than the law-adhering model does. In both the la...

Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity*

Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity*

Effects of topic relevancy and attitude similarity on two measures of affiliation

Ss were exposed to an anonymous stranger with similar or dissimilar attitudes on topics high or low in relevancy to friendship. Two judgments were made about the stranger: the degree of liking and the highest level of friendship that could be developed with him. Main effects for similarity and relevancy and a three-way interaction with type of judgment were found. Analysis of simple effects revealed that the attraction responses were a function of similarity and not relevancy. The expected level of friendship responses was influenced by the interaction effects of relevancy and similarity: relevancy had a highly significant effect under attitude similarity and not under attitude dissimilarity.