Introduction

Contribution to online communities has been characterized as a public good (Kollock1996). Experiments in economists and social psychologists have documented that under many situations individuals will not exert as much effort or perform as well when working jointly with others than they would if working individually (Ledyard1995; Karau1993). Terms such as ?social loafing? and ?free riding? are used to describe this phenomenon.

A great body of literature in both Economics and Social Psychology has attempted to determine under what circumstances individuals are more prone to social loafing and various ways of mediating this effect (Ostrom2000; Karau1993). Although many of the findings are quite consistent and well documented, designers of CSCW systems have rarely translated these findings into design recommendations for online communities (see Kollock1998 and Beenen2004 for exceptions to this trend). Kraut has complained that CSCW research has not sufficiently mined the social psychology literature in particular (2003) and he and various colleagues are working to develop a mid-level design theory that will fill this gap (Chen2003). Despite its potential for success, this research agenda is still in its infancy and additional design ideas are needed. This paper will propose a novel design idea using social psychology as a motivation for its probable success. I will first describe social psychology research on social facilitation and social loafing and then will explain the design idea in terms of theories that describe these phenomena.

Social Facilitation & Social Loafing

Social facilitation and social loafing both describe how individual?s motivation changes in a group setting. Social facilitation describes how individuals exhibit higher motivation when they perform tasks or activities in the presence of others (e.g., competitors, evaluators, sources of comparison) than when they are alone. Most social psychology studies have used the literal presence of others as the group condition. A longstanding debate among social psychologists is whether or not the mere presence of individuals is the motivating factor (due to increased arousal) or whether the potential for evaluation is the true motivator. Williams et al., summarize the findings on this research and conclude that both mere presence and that the potential for evaluation are sufficient to explain social-facilitation effects and that they are likely additively related (2004). It is not entirely clear what ?mere presence? would mean in a computer-mediated sense and if it can induce increased motivation, especially if it is a biological response as has been proposed by Blascovich. This is an interesting question that could likely inform social psychology results as well as provide practical advice to designers. The proposed design outlined in the next section will attempt to use the ?presence? and evaluation capabilities of others to induce higher motivation.

Social loafing, as described above, is the observation that when individuals are working on a collective project they will not be as motivated to participate as they would be if they were alone. The key difference between social facilitation and social loafing is how the individuals view the ?others? (Williams et. al 2004) and the nature of the task. Social facilitation occurs in situations where the ?others? are seen as potential evaluators, competitors, and sources of comparison and when the task is individual in nature. Social loafing occurs in situations where the ?others? are sharing task demands and evaluation. The focus of my design will be to use tools that emphasize how the situation is more related to social facilitation than social loafing.

Design Idea

The broad goal of my design idea is to encourage participation in asynchronous online communities. The methods employed will not be entirely new, but the overall motivation and combination of design elements will be novel. The basic idea is to provide awareness tools (see Olson and Olson 2002 for a summary of CSCW research on this area) that make clear to a member that other people can ?see? her activity that is related to the task that is trying to be induced. Important decisions of how this is implemented relate to the relationship of the viewers; are they competitors, points of comparison, evaluators, members of a subgroup, friends? The social psychology literature on social facilitation and mediation of social loafing has much to say concerning these properties. It has also highlighted some problems with certain methods. For example, situations where evaluation is emphasized can reduce perceived control, increase stress, and impair performance on complex tasks (Williams et al. 2004).

The original motivation for including awareness tools in CSCW applications was the recognition that much of the worthwhile work-related conversation happened at unexpected times and places (e.g., at the drinking fountain and copy machine) and that CSCW applications could potentially help individuals recreate these types of situations electronically. The motivation for awareness tools in this section is entirely different. The basic idea is to use the ?digital presence? of others to increase motivation as is observed in social facilitation situations. These tools will be most successful in situations where the task that is being performed can be compared across individuals and can be separated into individual chunks.

Implementation in MovieLens

This section will describe a specific implementation of the ideas explained so far in the setting of inducing more movie ratings from members at MovieLens (see Beenen2004 for a description of MovieLens and other methods used to induce more ratings). Although there is a collective benefit of others rating movies (e.g., as is the case in situations where social loafing is observed), the task is easily measurable, comparable across individuals, and individual in nature, making theories of social facilitation relevant. However, in order to encourage the motivational gains found in social facilitation situations it is necessary to make the presence (and possibly the evaluation or comparison capability) of others salient to an individual. The awareness mechanism described below is one example of how to do this, although many other implementations could be imagined and compared in field studies.

I propose that an awareness tool be built with the following features:

• The tool shows the names (and possibly icons) of a small number of other individuals currently logged into the system who will also see your name. Variations that could be empirically tested include the number of others that are shown and the relationship of those others to the individual (e.g., are they friends or strangers?). Various social psychology theories predict different outcomes based upon these factors (Williams et al. 2004). This limited feature alone will be a proxy for mere presence of others. To remind the user that others are ?present? it should be apparent when other join and leave the group.
• The second important feature is to build in tools that encourage comparison, evaluation, and/or competition to form between members. At the very least, the number of movies rated (or perhaps the number of unique movies rated) by each of the individuals should be shown. Competition could be encouraged by ranking the users and allowing them to send taunts or other messages to one another easily. The group total ratings could also be shown and compared to other groups of similar size to induce motivation (Beenen2004; Karau1993).

The key insight into this design is to encourage people to think of contributions in a social facilitation setting rather than a social loafing situation through the use of awareness tools. The "others" are seen as competitors and evaluators working on side-by-side tasks rather than as sharing the same task demands and evaluation. This approach will not work with all types of contributions to online communities, but is likely to work in situations like the one described. A field experiment could be performed to see if ?mere digital presence? is enough to induce increased participation using this basic design with and without the second feature.

References

Beenen, G., Ling, K., Wang, X., Chang, K., Frankowski, D., Resnick, P., and Kraut, R.E.. ?Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities.? Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2004 Conference on CSCW, Chicago, IL. 2004.

Chen, Y., Kiesler, S., Konstan, J., Kraut, R., Resnick, P., Reidl, J., & Terveen, L. (2003). Designing on-line communities to enhance participation -- bridging theory and practice. A proposal to the National Science Foundation. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University.

Karau, S. & Williams, K. (1993) ?Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706.

Kollock, P., & Smith, M. (1996) ?Managing the Virtual Commons.? In Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Susan Herring. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 109-128.

Kollock, P. (1998) ?Design principles for Online Communities.? PC Update 15(5):58-60. June 1998.

Kraut, R. (2003) ?Applying social psychology theory to the problems of group work. In J. M. Carroll (Ed.), HCI models, theories, and frameworks: toward a multidisciplinary science (pp. 325-356). New York: Morgan Kaufman.

Ledyard, J. (1995). ?Public goods: A survey of experimental research.? In J. H. Kagel & A. Roth (Eds.), The handbook of experimental economics (pp. 111-194). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Olson, G.M., & Olson, J.S. (2002) ?Groupware and computer supported cooperative work.? In J.J. Jacko & A.Sears (Eds.), The human-computer interaction handbook: fundamentals, evolving technologies and emerging applications, 583 ? 595. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ostrom, E. (2000). ?Collective action and the evolution of social norms.? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(3), 137-158.

Williams, K.D., Harkins, S.G., and Karau, S.J. (2004) ?Social Performance.? In The Sage Handbook of Social Psychology by M.A. Hogg and J. Cooper (pp. 279-294). Sage Publications Ltd.