The first stone: does a 1974 art experiment explain how we vote here?

In 1974 Marina Abramović ran an experiment in Naples. She stood still for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her, using 72 objects laid out on a table - some pleasant, some capable of causing harm. The point was to see how people behave when they can do anything without consequence. For the first hour, nothing happened. People used the harmless objects. Then one person did something unpleasant, and after that the dam broke - the escalation fed on itself, and it ended with someone holding a loaded gun to her. The question I've never been able to answer: were the people who started hurting her doing it deliberately, or had they simply stopped telling the difference between reality and a game?

I keep thinking about that when I watch votes here. The first downvote often triggers an avalanche of others, frequently with no justification at all. It works the way stoning worked in ancient cultures: once the first stone was thrown, the rest followed automatically, and the people throwing them weren't weighing what they were doing or whether they were harming an actual person. The first stone was permission - or possibly a demonstration to everyone else that no consequence was coming. Someone put this well in another thread here: when a post sits at -10, the average user doesn't stop and think "I wonder why this is unpopular, let me look at the nuances." They think "the hive mind has spoken, this is trash," and they add their vote to the pile. Nobody weighs their own contribution, because the stone before theirs already established that no consequence is coming.

Monty Python got there first, of course. The stoning scene in Life of Brian is exactly this: nobody in that crowd thinks of themselves as a bad person. They've just turned up, and somewhere in the crowd the goodness quietly goes missing.

The same applies to upvotes. They don't measure quality. They show reflexes, and maybe the intentions of the voters, rather than anything about the content being judged. And often it's done without any thought at all: research on Reddit specifically found that 73% of people voting hadn't even looked at the content. Which brings me back to Naples. How many people come here to discharge their emotions with no consequence attached?

Share what you make of it. And if you think I've got this wrong, that's the more interesting comment. Though I suspect none of us really knows which group we'd have been in that room in Naples.

Abramović describing the performance in her own words (MoMA): https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/243/3118

The Reddit study — Glenski, Pennycuff & Weninger, Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit (IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2017). Full text is free here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05267