The contagion of malicious behaviors in online games

This article investigates whether individual users are more likely to display malicious behavior after receiving social reinforcement from friends in their online social networks. We analyze the dynamics of game bot diffusion on the basis of real data supplied by a major massively multiplayer online role-playing game company. We find that the social reinforcement, measured by the ratio of bot friends over total friends, affects the likelihood of game bot adoption and the commitment in terms of usage time.