- Recruited participants who had rated rare movies by sending them an email inviting them to participate in a movie rating campaign
- Different messages were within the invitation to vary the participants’ perceptions of their uniqueness and who would benefit from their contributions

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- Overview
- Subjects
- Uniqueness
- Benefit
- Measuring contribution

Study 1 Methods

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

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

Study 1 Methods: Overview

- Members who logged in at least 1 time in that year were considered active, they recruited 830 active MovieLens subscribers who had previously rated rarely rated movies
- The subjects had rated at least 3 rarely rated movies or had at least 15% of all their rated movies be rarely rated movies
- The text of the email invitation manipulated two variables: the uniqueness and benefit

Study 1 Methods: Subjects

- Subjects were sent a personalized email that told them they were selected for the campaign because they tended to rate movies that few other MovieLens users had rated
- Contained text like: “As someone with fairly unusual tastes, you have been an especially valuable user of MovieLens”. This was meant to foster the idea of uniqueness in participants

Study 1 Methods: Uniqueness

- Participants grouped in four conditions: no benefit, only benefit to self, only benefit to others, benefit to both self and others
- Self-benefit message: “Rating more movies helps you! The more ratings you provide, the easier it is for MovieLens to identify people with similar tastes to yours, and thus make accurate recommendations for you”
- Other-benefit message: “Rating more movies helps the MovieLens community! The more ratings you provide, the more information we have about each movie and the easier it is to make accurate recommendations for other people”
- Both benefit: a combination of the messages displayed above
- No-benefit: received a message not similar to either of those messages

Study 1 Methods: Benefit

- Logged data from participants for the week following the invitation
- Dependent variable: number of ratings that participants made during the week following their invitation

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