Professor Paul Resnick at Vircomm14 – 'Motivating Contribution: 5 theories and 35 design claims

Motivating Contribution: 5 Theories and 35 Design Claims

Paul Resnick

Professor

University of Michigan

School of Information

Online communities face challenges typical of off-line groups

• Community start-up• Recruit, select and socialize members• Encourage commitment• Elicit contribution• Regulate behavior• Coordinate activity

But anonymity, weak ties, high turnover, & lack of institutionalization make challenges more daunting online

Evidence-based Social Design

• Mine the rich empirical and theoretical literatures in psychology and economics

• Develop design claims – Hypotheses about the effects of social design decisions

• Sometimes directly tested in the online context and sometimes only extensions of empirically tested theories developed in offline settings

Inspiration

Kurt Lewin

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory”

“If you want to understand something, try to change it”

Some Theories

• Latane’s Social Impact Theory• Social Proof• Goal Setting• Intrinsic Motivators• Collective Effort Model

The Roles of Theory and Evidence

• Identify Challenges• Generate Solution Ideas• Predict Consequences

Roles For Theory

• Identifying Challenges

Identifying Challenges

• Economics: Public Goods – Private provision underprovision

• Psychology: Social Loafing– In group contribution setting less individual effort

• Implications for online communities– Some valuable tasks won’t be done

• Support forums: Questions, answers, empathy• Recommender systems: Votes, opinions, comments• Facebook: Invites, accepts, wall posts, pictures • WoW guild: Time, skill development• OSS: Patches, code, translations, documentation• Wikipedia: New articles, facts, copy-editing, cash

– …unless you design for it

Wikipedia Stubs & Unassessed Articles• Many Wikipedia articles haven’t been assessed for

quality or importance• 58% of important ones are of low quality

Roles For Theory

• Identifying Challenges• Guide to Where to Look for Solution Opportunities

Collective Effort Model: Guide to Opportunities

individual effort

individual performance

individual motivation

group performance

individual utility

Adapted from Karau and Williams, 1993

Guide to Opportunities

individual effort



group performance

individual utility

uniqueness


individual effort



group performance

individual utility

uniqueness

commitment


individual effort



group performance

individual utility

uniquenesscommitment

Performance-contingent rewards

Task-contingent rewards


individual effort



group performance

individual utility




Intrinsic Motivators


individual effort



group performance

individual utility




Intrinsic Motivators

Persuasive Messages

Collective Effort Model++

Roles For Theory

• Identifying Challenges• Guide to Where to Look for Solution Opportunities• Predicting Effects: Design Claims

Design Alternative X…

…Leads to Outcome Y…

…Under Conditions Z– E.g.,

• Coupling goals with specific deadlines leads to increases in contributions as the deadlines approach

• Group goals elicit contribution most among people who identify with the group

Design Levers

• Community structure• Content, tasks & activities• Selection, sorting & highlighting• External communication• Feedback & rewards• Roles, rules, policies and procedures• Access controls• Presentation and framing

Design Claims and Pattern Languages

• Design pattern: a formal way of documenting a solution to a design problem in a particular field of expertise.

• May or may not document the reasons why a problem exists and why the solution is a good one

• Captures the common solutions, but not necessarily the effective ones

Encouraging Contributions

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

Requests Focus Attention on Needed Contributions

• Make the list of needed contributions easily visible to increase the likelihood that the community will provide them

Email Request to Contribute to Movielens Quadruples Ratings

• In week after email reminder, contributions quadrupled, to ~ 20 ratings/person from ~5.4

SOME ASKS WORK BETTER THAN OTHERS

Ask When They Can Act• News site with a “Leave a

comment” form at the end of each article

• Fewer than 0.1% leave comments

• Experiment to estimate the value of explicit requests– No ask: “Leave a comment”

form at end of article– Immediate: Pop-up “Leave

a comment” when user opens article

– Delayed: Pop-up “Leave a comment” on closing article

Delayed

Immediate

No ask

0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Comments by Type of Request

Number of comments

(Wash & Lampe, 2012)

Ask For Something Doable: Intelligent Task Routing (Cosley, 2007)

SuggestBotSuggestions

Suggestions Quadruple Editing Rates

Effective Requests

• DC1: Visible list of tasks• DC2: Tools for finding and tracking tasks• DC3: Matching to tasks that interest them

Latane's Social Impact Theory

• Power of persuasive attempt– increases with number (immediacy, importance) of people

asking• declining marginal rate

– decreases with number of people being asked• declining marginal rate

Chat Room Experiment

• “Can you tell me how to see someone’s profile”– 400 Chat rooms– DV=Time to response

• People are slower to respond when others are present

• Diffusion of responsibility is reduced when people are called by name

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Others present

Tim

e to

res

po

nd

(se

con

ds)

No name

0

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Others present

Tim

e to

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nd

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No name Name

Markey(2000)

Systematic vs. Heuristic Processing

• Systematic: decisions people care about– Gather evidence– Weigh pros and cons

• Heuristic: routine decisions– Superficial cues– Heuristics

Social Proof

• Others doing something signals that it's good/valuable

Effective Requests

• DC1: Visible list of tasks• DC2: Tools for finding and tracking tasks• DC3: Matching to tasks that interest them• DC4: specific people vs. broadcast• DC5: Simple requests for routine decisions• DC6: Explain benefits for important decisions• DC7 and 8: Fear campaigns higher importance,

systematic processing• DC9: requests from high status people• DC10 and 11: requests from people you like (similar,

attractive, familiar)• DC12: seeing that others complied

Goal Setting Theory• Goals motivate effort, perseverance & performance

– Trigger for both self-reward (e.g., self-efficacy) & external reward (e.g., money, reputation, promotion)

• Goals are more effective if– Specific & challenging rather than easy goals or vague ‘do your

best’– Immediate, with feedback– People commit selves to the goals – because of importance,

incentives, self-esteem, …– People envision the specific circumstance & method they will

use to achieve them

• Design claim: Providing members with specific and highly challenging goals, whether self-set or system-suggested, increases contribution.

Experiment in MovieLens

• Send email to ~900 MovieLens subscribers– Gave non-specific, do your best goal or specific, numerical

contribution goals

Goal Experiment Results

• Results– Specific, challenging goals increased contribution– Group assignment increased contributions

In-game Goals in WoW

• In WoW players receive extra powers each 10-levels implicit goal setting

• Ducheneaut, N., et al.(2007). The life and death of online gaming communities: A look at guilds in world of warcraft. in SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. San Jose, California, USA.

Weekly minutes playing World of Warcraft, by level

Featured Status in Wikipedia as a Challenge

Wikipedia edits before and after reaching featured status

WikiProjects Use Collaborations of the Week (COTW) as Time-Delimited Goals

43

A COTW announcement in a project page

An example template identifying an article as a COTW

Get designated to good status in a defined period (e.g., a week or a month)

Goal doubles contribution

44

Pre-Collaboration Collaboration Post-Collaboration

Edits per person on the collaboration articles

Non self-identified members

Self-identified group members

Goal has much larger effect on group members

45

Pre-Collaboration Collaboration Post-Collaboration

Edits per person on the collaboration articles

Non self-identified members

Self-identified group members

Goal Setting Design Claims

• DC13: specific and highly challenging goals• DC14: deadlines• DC15: frequent feedback

Theories of Intrinsic Motivation

• Social contact• Challenge• Mastery• Competition• Autonomy• ...

Enhancing Intrinsic Motivation

• DC16: combine contribution with social contact• DC17: immersive experiences• DC18: performance feedback• DC19: systematic quant feedback verbal feedback

as well• DC20: performance feedback only works if perceived

as sincere• DC21: comparative performance feedback

– DC22: but may create game-like atmosphere

Extrinsic Rewards

• Reinforcements are rewards given after a behavior• Incentives are promises given before the behavior to

cause people to produce it– Reinforcement can lead to incentive if it’s predictable– But persistence of behavior is greatest if not predictable

• Form of rewards: – $– Points– Praise– Reputation– Privileges

Reinforcement: Barnstars

Enhancing Extrinsic Motivation

• DC23: rewards• DC24: task-contingent rewards for small-discrete tasks

motivate taking on the task, but not effort on them• DC25: rewards "gaming the system"/manipulation• DC26: non-performance-contingent rewards

manipulation• DC27: performance-contingent can prevent

manipulation• DC28: status and privileges less gaming than material

rewards• DC29: non-transparency less manipulation

Interfering with Intrinsic Motivation: Cameron et al 2001 • + external

reward enhances intrinsic motivation

• - external reward decreases intrinsic motivation

• Effect on feelings of control is key explanatory variable

Tradeoffs

• DC30: Task-contingent rewards, especially money, reduce intrinsic motivation

• DC31: Pay a lot or don't pay at all

Collective Effort Model++

Uniqueness & Benefits Experiment

• Email invitations to join a movie rating campaign• Uniqueness

– Unique: We are contacting you because as someone with fairly unusual tastes, …, your contributions are especially valuable

– Non-unique: "We are contacting you because as someone with fairly typical tastes, ……, your contributions are especially valuable

• Which will lead to more contributions?

Emphasizing Uniqueness Increased Number of Ratings

• H1: Unique condition rated 18% more movies than non-unique condition (means = 20.92 vs. 17.65, p<.05).

• Unique condition rated 40% more rarely-rated movies than those in non-unique condition (means = 1.82 vs. 1.30,

p<.05). 16

17

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20

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Non-unique

Unique

#Rat

ings

Expectancy-Value of Group Outcomes

• DC32: Commitment to the group• DC33: Small rather than large group• DC34: Unique contributions to make• DC35: See others' complementary contributions

REVIEW

The Roles of Theory and Evidence

• Identify Challenges• Generate Solution Ideas• Predict Consequences

Theories

• Latane’s Social Impact Theory• Social Proof• Goal Setting• Intrinsic Motivators• Collective Effort Model

Design Levers

• Community structure• Content, tasks & activities• Selection, sorting & highlighting• External communication• Feedback & rewards• Roles, rules, policies and procedures• Access controls• Presentation and framing

Other Challenges

• Newcomer Recruitment and Socialization• Enhancing Commitment• Regulating Behavior• Community Startup

Social Media

Professor Paul Resnick at Vircomm14 – 'Motivating Contribution: 5 theories and 35 design claims