Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities

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)