ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
The amplification of risk in experimental diffusion chains.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neural similarity predicts whether strangers become friends.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Speech Repression and Threat Narratives in Politics: Social Goals and Cognitive Foundations.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-off influence social decision-making in dyads.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Climate risk expressions of public views and government responses in China.Scientific data · 2025Article
- A two-layer network model of the evolution of public risk perception of emerging technologies.Heliyon · 2025Article
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Humans create more novelty than ChatGPT when asked to retell a story.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Resampling reduces bias amplification in experimental social networks.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Peer-to-peer: The Social Transmission of Symptoms Online.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2023Article
- The role of position in consensus dynamics of polarizable networks.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Quantifying the retention of emotions across story retellings.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The social amplification of risk framework: New perspectives.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2022Article
- Conformist social learning leads to self-organised prevention against adverse bias in risky decision making.eLife · 2022Article
- Individual and collective learning in groups facing danger.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Social sampling and expressed attitudes: Authenticity preference and social extremeness aversion lead to social norm effects and polarization.Psychological review · 2022Article
- Social Media Overload and Anxiety Among University Students During the COVID-19 Omicron Wave Lockdown: A Cross-Sectional Study in Shanghai, China, 2022.International journal of public health · 2022Article
- Access to Vaccination Information and Confidence/Hesitancy Towards Childhood Vaccination: A Cross-Sectional Survey in China.Vaccines · 2021Article
- Similarity in functional brain connectivity at rest predicts interpersonal closeness in the social network of an entire village.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- A brief history of risk.Cognition · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding how people form and revise their perception of risk is central to designing efficient risk communication methods, eliciting risk awareness, and avoiding unnecessary anxiety among the public. However, public responses to hazardous events such as climate change, contagious outbreaks, and terrorist threats are complex and difficult-to-anticipate phenomena. Although many psychological factors influencing risk perception have been identified in the past, it remains unclear how perceptions of risk change when propagated from one person to another and what impact the repeated social transmission of perceived risk has at the population scale. Here, we study the social dynamics of risk perception by analyzing how messages detailing the benefits and harms of a controversial antibacterial agent undergo change when passed from one person to the next in 10-subject experimental diffusion chains. Our analyses show that when messages are propagated through the diffusion chains, they tend to become shorter, gradually inaccurate, and increasingly dissimilar between chains. In contrast, the perception of risk is propagated with higher fidelity due to participants manipulating messages to fit their preconceptions, thereby influencing the judgments of subsequent participants. Computer simulations implementing this simple influence mechanism show that small judgment biases tend to become more extreme, even when the injected message contradicts preconceived risk judgments. Our results provide quantitative insights into the social amplification of risk perception, and can help policy makers better anticipate and manage the public response to emerging threats.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.