- Social psychology theories may be incomplete because they identify isolated main effects but not the effects of context.
- The lack of detail in social science theories forces the designer to improvise when attempting to apply social psychological knowledge to solve design problems.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The attempt to derive design innovations from social science theory proved successful in motivating online community contributions. Study 1 demonstrated that emails emphasizing the uniqueness of potential contributions increased movie ratings more effectively than messages emphasizing commonality or benefit. Study 2 results contradicted the collective effort model by revealing that participants exerted more effort when in groups rather than when individually identified. Ultimately, mining social science theory serves as a useful general strategy for the design of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems. When interventions fail to increase contributions, researchers identify three possible classes of explanations: failures of implementation, mismatches between engineering and scientific disciplines, and incomplete theories.

Conclusions on Using Social Psychology to Motivate Online Contributions

https://presnick.people.si.umich.edu/papers/cscw04/cscw2004preprint.pdf

Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions
to Online Communities (Gerard Beenen et al.)

- The emails sent to subjects could have been a poor way to implement the social psychology design theories
- Manipulation of wording in the emails may have been too weak

Failures of Implementation

- HCI and CSCW focus mainly on problem-solving while social psychology focuses mainly on determining the causes of social phenomena
- Because the conductors of this study were thinking like designers, they gave the group in study 2 a name (Explorers) which may have induced a sense of group commitment that overpowered the social loafing effect, thus making it difficult to test the hypothesis involving the main effects predicted by social loafing theory

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