• Theory

• Spillovers

• Identity flexibility and sustainable cooperation

“It’s Not Always Possible to Live Your Life Openly or Honestly in the Same Way” — Workplace Inclusion of Lesbian and Gay Humanitarian Aid Workers in Doctors Without Borders A bad barrel spoils a good apple: How uncertainty and networks affect whether matching rules can foster cooperation Are organizational gender diversity management practices effective?

Diffusion studies investigate the propagation of behavior, attitudes or beliefs across a networked population. Some sustainable behavior is binary, e.g. whether or not to purchase green energy, while others are more continuous, e.g., wastefulness with plastic. Similarly, attitudes and beliefs often allow nuance, but can become practically dichotomous in polarized environments. We argue that this basic property of behavior and attitudes - whether they are dichotomous or continuous – can critically affect whether a population becomes homogenous in its adoption of that behavior. Specifically, binary behavior allows local convergence on a deviant outcome, as multiple states can be local majorities, while continuous behavior becomes uniform across the network through a logic of communicating vessels. We present a basic model representing our argument and report on a laboratory experiment that tests it. Results show that if in a networked group adjacent persons receive deviant and wrong information, also referred to as a local majority of deviant information in this paper, participants are indeed less likely to make correct final investments . This effect is significant in the binary decision and diffusion process, but not in the continuous decision process. However, there is no statistical difference between the two decision processes, which does not allow us to claim that across various network structures, local majorities are more problematic for the adoption of binary behavior than continuous behavior.

Does the basic property of behavior and attitudes - whether they are dichotomous or continuous – critically affect whether a population becomes homogenous in its adoption of that behavior. Specifically do binary behavior allow local convergence on a deviant outcome, as multiple states can be local majorities, while continuous behavior becomes uniform across the network through a logic of communicating vessels?

• Collected during project
• -

• Experiment

No

—

• z-tree files and stata

• Structured

• English

05/10/2020

19/10/2021

Utrecht the Netherlands

05/10/2020

19/10/2021

No