Vincent Buskens

• Prof. dr. ir
• Professor (Full) at Utrecht University

Using Coleman's well-known scheme as an anchor, we review key features of explanations of social phenomena that employ micro-macro models. Some antecedents of micro-macro models and of Coleman's scheme as well as some paradigmatic examples of micro-macro links are sketched. We then discuss micro-level assumptions in micro-macro explanations and the...

Moral judgment involves the interplay of emotions and social cognitions. The male sex-hormone testosterone might play a role in moral reasoning as males are more utilitarian than females in their moral decisions, and high salivary testosterone levels also are associated with utilitarian moral decisions. However, there is no direct evidence for a ro...

Behavioral experiments are rarely used as an empirical strategy in computational social science, where empirical studies typically focus on analyzing large-scale digital trace data. We argue that behavioral experiments have a role in computational social science, in particular in combination with agent-based modeling – a key theoretical strategy in...

Background Vaccinations are a cornerstone of public health. However, reluctance to accepting vaccines is common. Using longitudinal data, we investigated which individual and contextual factors were associated with switching preferences from initial hesitancy or unwillingness toward acceptance of a first COVID-19 vaccination. Methods 12,512 partic...

Repeated interactions and contractual agreements are examples of different ways of organizing interactions in social and economic life and can foster cooperation in social dilemmas. Thus, when involved in social dilemmas, actors have incentives to form long-term relations with repeated interactions or to enter into contractual agreements. We analyz...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns were a widely used strategy to reduce disease transmission. However, there was much debate about the optimal level of strictness and duration of lockdowns. This study considers how lockdowns impact public health opinions, which in turn influence adherence to and effectiveness of these measures. We developed a...

Over the last decades, drinking water and energy use have increased exponentially. To preserve ecosystems in the long term, a change in behavior is necessary on all levels of society including on the household level. This paper presents an integrated review of the determinants of long-term drinking water and energy conservation behavior of househol...

In 25 years, research on reputation-based online markets has produced robust evidence on the existence of the so-called reputation effect, that is the positive relation between online traders’ reputations and these traders’ market success in terms of sales and prices. However, there is an ongoing debate on what the size of the reputation effect mea...

Mechanisms of social control reinforce norms that appear harmful or wasteful, such as mutilation practises or extensive body tattoos. We suggest such norms arise to serve as signals that distinguish between ingroup ‘friends' and outgroup ‘foes', facilitating parochial cooperation. Combining insights from research on signalling and parochial coopera...

People tend to limit social contacts during times of increased health risks, leading to disruption of social networks thus changing the course of epidemics. To what extent, however, do people show such avoidance reactions? To test the predictions and assumptions of an agent-based model on the feedback loop between avoidance behavior, social network...

To encourage long-term cooperation in social dilemmas such as common-pool resources, the importance of sanctioning is often stressed. Elinor Ostrom advocates graduated sanctioning: the severity of a defector’s punishment is dependent on the extent of their history of deviant behaviour. In addition, endogenously chosen sanctioning is argued to induc...

One of the most popular techniques of persuasion in online marketing is social proof, also referred to as social validation. It takes advantage of the fact that when other individuals have decided in favor of a particular behavior people are more likely to follow that behavior as it is perceived as more valid. Yet there is a theoretical reason to b...

Mechanisms of social control reinforce norms that appear harmful or wasteful, such as mutilation practices or extensive body tattoos. We suggest such norms arise to serve as signals that distinguish between ingroup “friends” and outgroup “foes”, facilitating parochial cooperation. Combining insights from research on signalling and parochial coopera...

People commonly reject unfair offers even if this leaves them worse off. Some explain this as a rational response based on social preferences. Others argue that emotions override self-interest in the determination of rejection behavior. We conducted an experiment in which we measured responders’ biophysical reactions (EEG and EMG) to fair and unfai...

In a number of European countries, local municipalities, housing cooperatives, and citizen-based initiatives have been training energy coaches to help citizens improve the sustainability of their homes. These local volunteers offer an analysis of a citizen’s home to advise on how to make it more sustainable, comparing citizens’ consumption patterns...

Is peer sanctioning a sustainable solution to the problem of human cooperation? We conducted an exact multilab replication (N = 1,008; 7 labs × 12 groups × 12 participants) of an experiment by Gürerk, Irlenbusch, and Rockenbach published in Science in 2006 (Gürerk Ö, Irlenbusch B, Rockenbach B. The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions....

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) uses the social network of participants to sample people of populations that can be challenging to engage. While in this context RDS offers improvements on standard sampling methods, it does not always generate a sufficiently large sample. In this study we aimed to identify preferences of men who have sex with men (...

Past major epidemic events showed that when an infectious disease is perceived to cause severe health outcomes, individuals modify health behavior affecting epidemic dynamics. To investigate the effect of this feedback relationship on epidemic dynamics, we developed a compartmental model that couples a disease spread framework with competition of t...

The diffusion of information, norms, and practices across a social network can be initiated by compelling a small number of seed individuals to adopt first. Strategies proposed in previous work either assume full network information or a large degree of control over what information is collected. However, privacy settings on the Internet and high n...

How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leavin...

Research has repeatedly shown that the spread of infectious diseases is influenced by properties of our social networks. Small-world like structures with densely connected clusters bridged by only a few connections, for example, are not only known to diminish disease spread, but also to increase the chance for a disease to spread to any part of the...

The effect of seller reputation on seller success in peer-to-peer online markets has been investigated in dozens of studies by means of the analysis of digital trace data. A recent meta-analysis synthesizing evidence from over a hundred studies corroborates that sellers with a better reputation sell more products at higher prices. However, the meta...

The current study investigates whether self-talk phrases can influence behavior in Ultimatum Games. In our three self-talk treatments, participants were instructed to tell themselves ( i ) to keep their own interests in mind, ( ii ) to also think of the other person, or ( iii ) to take some time to contemplate their decision. We investigate how suc...

Past major epidemic events showed that when an infectious disease is perceived to cause severe health outcomes, individuals modify health behavior affecting epidemic dynamics. To investigate the effect of this feedback relationship on epidemic dynamics, we developed a compartmental model that couples a disease spread framework with competition of t...

The diffusion of information, norms, and practices across a social network can be initiated by compelling a small number of seed individuals to adopt first. Strategies proposed in previous work either assume full network information or large degree of control over what information is collected. However, privacy settings on the Internet and high non...

A twenty-year-old idea from network science is that vaccination campaigns would be more effective if high-contact individuals were preferentially targeted. Implementation is impeded by the ethical and practical problem of differentiating vaccine access based on a personal characteristic that is hard-to-measure and private. Here, we propose the use...

While pandemic containment measures benefit public health, they may jeopardize the social structure of society. We hypothesize that lockdowns and prolonged social distancing measures hinder social support and invite norm violations, eroding social trust. We conducted a pre-registered pre-post study on a representative sample of the Dutch population...

Recent research shows an increasing interest in the interplay of social networks and infectious diseases. Many studies either neglect explicit changes in health behavior or consider networks to be static, despite empirical evidence that people seek to distance themselves from diseases in social networks. We propose an adaptable steppingstone model...

Cooperation in groups often requires individual members to make costly contributions that benefit the group as a whole. Prior research suggests that shared norms can help to support ingroup cooperation by prescribing common standards of how much to contribute. These common standards may be disrupted when groups undergo membership change, i.e., when...

While pandemic containment measures benefit public health, they may jeopardize the social structure of society. We argue that lockdowns and prolonged social distancing measures hinder social support and invite norm violations, eroding social trust. We conducted a pre-registered pre-post study on a representative sample of the Dutch population (n =...

Recent research shows an increasing interest in the interplay of social networks and infectious diseases. Many studies either neglect explicit changes in health behavior or consider networks to be static, despite empirical evidence that people seek to distance themselves from diseases in social networks. We propose an adaptable steppingstone model...

Is it possible to identify a ‘riches line’, distinguishing the ‘rich’ from the ‘super-rich’? Recent work in political philosophy suggests that this is theoretically possible. This study examines for the first time the empirical plausibility of a riches line, based on novel data collected from a representative sample of the Dutch population. The dat...

Most online market exchanges are governed by reputation systems, which allow traders to comment on one another’s behavior and attributes with ratings and text messages. These ratings then constitute sellers’ reputations that serve as signals of their trustworthiness and competence. The large body of research investigating the effect of reputation o...

Background New food technologies developed by producers who want to spread their innovation require potential new adopters to receive information about the innovation as well as to develop trust about the appropriateness and quality of the new technology. Social networks are key for spreading information and for developing trust. In this essay, I w...

Norms can promote human cooperation to provide public goods. Yet, the potential of norms to promote cooperation may be limited to homogeneous groups in which all members benefit equally from the public good. Individual heterogeneity in the benefits of public good provision is commonly conjectured to bring about normative disagreements that harm coo...

Many sociologists and economists have maintained that costly sanctions are able to sustain cooperation, but whether carrots or sticks are more successful in this respect is still under dispute (e.g., Balliet, Mulder, and Van Lange 2011; Rand et al. 2009; Sefton, Schupp, and Walker 2007). Furthermore, while many studies investigated the effects of s...

While social network structures are thought to promote cooperation through reputation effects, as suggested by Raub and Weesie (1990), the option of partner choice may undermine these reputation effects in networks. This article approaches this dilemma by comparing the effects of partner choice and reputation diffusion in isolation as well as in co...

Background: Early detection, identification, and treatment of chronic hepatitis B through screening is vital for those at increased risk, e.g. born in hepatitis B endemic countries. In the Netherlands, Moroccan immigrants show low participation rates in health-related screening programmes. Since social networks influence health behaviour, we inves...

Property sharing is one of the most prominent examples of the rapidly expanding sharing economy. Travelers around the world often opt to stay at a stranger’s apartment instead of any other tourism accommodation. Trust is essential in this choice, because staying with, or taking in, strangers can entail great risks. To create trust between users, sh...

Individual differences in social dilemmas: the effect of trust on costly punishment in a public goods game The establishment of cooperation in public goods dilemmas is important to real life problems such as improving the environment. Cooperation is facilitated when people are able to punish uncooperative behavior. Individual characteristics of per...

Mutualism is reviving again in several countries, replying to state and market failure with an alternative, social insurance setup. We study participation in such new mutuals with a focus on embeddedness. We distinguish group-level embeddedness (network structure) and individual embeddedness (the type and quantity of ties to other group members) an...

We develop a game theoretic model of conflict and empirically test its predictions to study the emergence of social hierarchies in small groups. Previous research shows uncertainty about actors' ability may lead to more conflict; conflict demonstrates actors' ability and establishes relationships of dominance and submissiveness. Since we assume unc...

Contracts commit individuals to a future course of action and create feelings of entitlement on the parties. In a contractual gap, parties’ duties and rights are not univocal, and while promisors will often feel entitled to breach, promisees will feel entitled to receive the promised performance. This divergence leads to disputes, aggrievement, and...

Theory and empirical research have established that repeated interactions foster cooperation in social dilemmas. These effects of repeated interactions are meanwhile well known. Given these effects, actors have incentives for strategic tie formation in social dilemmas: they have incentives to establish long-term relations involving repeated interac...

Network structure has often proven to be important in understanding the decision behavior of individuals or agents in different interdependent situations. Computational studies predict that network structure has a crucial influence on behavior in iterated 2 by 2 asymmetric ‘battle of the sexes’ games. We test such behavioral predictions in an exper...

Trust problems are ubiquitous in social and economic exchange. They are known to be mitigated if exchange partners are embedded in social structures that disseminate information on past behavior. If such “network embeddedness” makes exchanges possible that would not be possible otherwise, it is also expected that actors are willing to exert effort...

Respondent-driven detection is a chain recruitment method used to sample contact persons of infected persons in order to enhance case finding. It starts with initial individuals, so-called seeds, who are invited for participation. Afterwards, seeds receive a fixed number of coupons to invite individuals with whom they had contact during a specific...

Mean number of successfully sent invitations, stratified by recruiter’s characteristics, as observed in the data set. (PDF)

Beta binomial distributions stratified by seeds (left figure) and recruitees (right figure), and by recruiters’ characteristics. The coloured lines indicate the different types of recruiters; the means of seeds and recruitees are indicated with the dashed lines. See S2 Table for the corresponding values observed in the data. (TIF)

Shapes of the beta-binomial distributions. (A) Beta-binomial distributions for different μ and with a high σ2, similar to observed in the data (B) Beta-binomial distributions for different μ and with the minimum possible σ2. The values in the plot show for each line the σ2. (TIF)

Influence on the maximum wave reached by recruitment trees. (TIF)

Successful sending observed in the data set, stratified by seeds and recruitees, and by recruiter’s characteristics. (PDF)

Parameter values for scenarios S15 to S18. (PDF)

Estimated probability of an individual having a positive or negative vaccine belief. (PDF)

Individuals with positive or negative beliefs as observed in Dutch sample. (PDF)

Output logistic regression for vaccine beliefs in Dutch sample. (PDF)

Reputation has often been proposed as the central mechanism that creates trust in the sharing economy. However, some sharing platforms that focus primarily on social rather than economically driven exchanges have managed to facilitate exchanges between users without the use of a reputation system. This could indicate that socially driven exchanges...

The mutual‐investment model predicts a positive relation between investments in training and employees’ willingness to behave cooperatively. In this paper, we argue that the extent to which employees increase their cooperative behavior after receiving training depends on the type of training provided, the skillfulness of the employee and the cohesi...

Employers are constantly seeking to improve employee performance by means of investing in employee training. The results of training are to a large extent dependent on employees’ willingness to behave productively in a cooperative manner. Yet, systematic evidence investigating the causal relation between training and employees’ cooperative behavior...

Network structure can have an important effect on the behavior of players in an iterated 2 × 2 game. We study the effect of network structure on global and local behavior in asymmetric coordination games using best response dynamics. We find that global behavior is highly dependent on network topology. Random (Erdös-Rényi) networks mostly converge...

We study the effects of different punishment institutions on cooperation in a six-person prisoner’s dilemma game in which actors observe others’ cooperation with some noise (i.e. imperfect public monitoring). Previous research has shown that peer punishment can sustain cooperation, if a certain proportion of group members punish defectors at a cost...

Users and potential users of the sharing economy need to place a considerable amount of trust in both the person and the platform with which they are dealing. The consequences of transaction partners' opportunism may be severe, for example damage to goods or endangered personal safety. Trust is, therefore, a key factor in overcoming uncertainty and...

Conventions guide our daily behavior. If everyone agrees on what the best convention is, coordination is easy. We study coordination games in which individuals have conflicting preferences. Theoretical arguments and experimental tests on conventions in networks start too much from the assumption that actors need to behave the same in their interact...

We study six-person Prisoner’s Dilemmas (PDs), in which subjects endogenously decide whether to implement a peer punishment institution in their group and whether the punishment institution, if implemented, implies more or less severe punishment. We consider PDs with perfect information on other subjects’ previous behavior and PDs in which subjects...

This article offers an overview of different variants of trust games and shows how game-theoretic modeling can contribute to an analysis of conditions for placing and honoring trust in such games. The focus is on explaining trust rather than on explaining consequences of trust for individual behavior or for outcomes such as societal cohesion or eco...

Despite the popularity of the notion that social cohesion in the form of dense social networks promotes cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemmas through reputation, very little experimental evidence for this claim exists. We address this issue by testing hypotheses from one of the few rigorous game-theoretic models on this topic, the Raub & Weesie model,...

Animal research has established that effects of hormones on social behaviour depend on characteristics of both individual and environment. Insight from research on humans into this interdependence is limited, though. Specifically, hardly any prior testosterone experiments in humans scrutinized the interdependency of testosterone with the social env...

A central feature of social networks is information sharing. The Internet and related computing technologies shape the relative costs of private information acquisition and forming links with others. This paper presents an experiment on the effects of changing costs. We find that a decline in relative costs of linking makes private investments mor...

Scientific Reports 6 : Article number: 18096 10.1038/srep18096 ; published online: 04 January 2016 ; updated: 25 February 2016 . The HTML version of this Article contains an error in the order of the Figures and their legends.

Testosterone has been associated with economically egoistic and materialistic behaviors, but -defensibly driven by reputable status seeking- also with economically fair, generous and cooperative behaviors. Problematically, social status and economic resources are inextricably intertwined in humans, thus testosterone's primal motives are concealed....

This article provides a short explanation of what rational choice theory is. Recent theoretical as well as empirical developments are discussed using the example of embeddedness effects. The theoretical developments address macro-level and micro-level extensions. The empirical part focuses on the value of using complementary research methods to tes...

Background: Transmission of respiratory pathogens in a population depends on the contact network patterns of individuals. To accurately understand and explain epidemic behaviour information on contact networks is required, but only limited empirical data is available. Online respondent-driven detection can provide relevant epidemiological data on...

Social dilemmas (sometimes referred to as “problems of collective action”, “tragedy of the commons”, or “public goods problems”) are situations with strategically interdependent actors such that individually rational behavior leads to an outcome that is less desirable for each actor than had they cooperated. In this chapter, we provide an overview...

Objectives. We investigated the feasibility of combining an online chain recruitment method (respondent-driven detection) and participatory surveillance panels to collect previously undetected information on infectious diseases via social networks of participants. Methods. In 2014, volunteers from 2 large panels in the Netherlands were invited to...