CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities

In CSCW '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (2004), pp. 212-221.

X Abstract

Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can provide mid-level design principles to address this problem. We tested the design principles in two field experiments. In one, members of an online movie recommender community were reminded of the uniqueness of their contributions and the benefits that follow from them. In the second, they were given a range of individual or group goals for contribution. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and challenging goals, but other predictions were not borne out. The paper ends with suggestions and challenges for mining social science theories as well as implications for design.

View the full article here:

ACM, DOI

This article has been bookmarked 63 times, initially on 2005-04-19.

2009-12-03 User Philonski
2009-08-08 User ramonovelar
2009-07-28 User biologyeditors
2009-07-20 User flip007
2009-02-25 User radaphat
2009-02-06 User amandafrench
2008-11-26 User britbohlinger
2008-03-31 User fbr
2008-02-28 User Actualal
2007-12-21 User eegilbert
2007-12-11 User jyew
2007-11-21 User hpiwowar
2007-10-26 User krisl
2007-10-18 User gruger
2007-09-15 User zinasahib
Group Semantic-Social-Networks
2007-02-05 User Hoenikker
2007-01-10 User als-project
2006-12-22 User craigtalbert
2006-12-21 User harperf
Group GroupLens
2006-12-10 User ible
Group VivesMinions
2006-10-24 User alisonruth
Group SITCRC
2006-08-25 User jmankoff , 1 note

I like this article because it's both a teaching article (hey folks, look at the power of using social psych. theory) and has results interesting for footprints.

The authors leveraged models of collective effort, social loafing, and so on to generate hypothesis about how to encourage movielens users to rate rare movies.

They used email to apply their interventios, and recruited members who had previously rated rare movies. Some of their findings: 1) they told users how unusual/unique they were (e.g. to rate rare movies). This worked. 2) they reminded users of the benefit personally and to movielens users as a whole of rating movies (better predictions). Mention of benefit at all depressed ratings. However, worst were only hearing about benefit to others and not self or vice versa. (an interaction effect). This may have failed for many reasons, including that people felt the email missed benefits they knew of. 3) they did both (this didn't help) 4) they gave users specific, numeric goals (this worked) 5) they gave users group goals (group goals were more effective than individual, a surprise) 6) they gave users really difficult goals (ratings did drop off a little for highest goals)

Some comments from the discussion == the intervention may have reversed the social loafing effect == where theory failed, reasons could have been (1) failures of implementation (2) mismatch between engineering and theory (e.g. the need to make specific, complex design decisions) (3) incomplete theories

The authors recommend checking out handbooks on social psychological theories (references 32-34 in their paper). Two other references we might want to look at are 26 -- weldon and weingard, group goals and group performance, british journal of scoial psych, 1993 32 and 27 matsui, akuyama and onglatco, effects of goals and feedback on performance in groups, journal of applied psych, 1987, 72(3)

2007-04-17 04:03:45
Group CMU-HCII
Group Footprints
User brusilovsky
Group social_navigation
Group Adaptive-Web
2006-08-07 User livingthingdan
Group livingthing
2006-07-11 User cnolet
2006-07-09 User pe3
2006-06-20 User davetown101
2005-11-09 User cyph3r
Group kickOffTUG-Robocup
2005-11-03 User marije
2005-08-18 User isti
2005-08-09 User indratmo
2005-08-07 User 4vgacias
2005-08-05 User sachac
Group utoronto-iml
2005-07-27 User GadgetMan
Group Ubicomp
Group IMLBloggers
User korakot
Group Philosophy_of_Information
Group Blog_and_Wiki_Research
2005-07-18 User mulciber
2005-07-13 User plonsdale
Group HCI-Bham
2005-07-07 User ryanshaw
Group sims_phd_cohort_2005
Group digital_youth
2005-06-05 User scholz
Group Sociology
Group MASSS
2005-06-02 User matta
2005-04-19 User palakorn
Group Drexel-HCI
Group Drexel-eVoting
Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.