- 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

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

Study 1 Methods: Measuring Contribution

- Overview
- Subjects
- Uniqueness
- Benefit
- Measuring contribution

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

- The study draws from the Collective Effort Model, theorized by Karau and Williams.
- The collective effort model is a theory to explain why people often work harder individually than in groups. It states that people work hard when they think their effort will help them achieve outcomes that they value
- If members feel that their contributions are redundant or unhelpful, then their contribution is unlikely to influence the group’s outcome

Three main hypotheses:
- Hypothesis 1: MovieLens users will rate more movies when the uniqueness of their contributions is made salient
- Hypothesis 2a: MovieLens users will rate more movies when the personal benefit they receive from doing so is made salient
- Hypothesis 2b: MovieLens users will rate move movies when the benefit they provide to the community is made salient
- Hypothesis 3: MovieLens users will rate more movies when the perception of both unique contribution and benefits to the community are made salient than when only unique contributions or benefits are made salient

Study 1: Motivating Contributions Through Framing Uniqueness and Benefit

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

- 397 (47.8%) members logged in and rated at least one movie
- Rated an average of 19.26 movies during the week, which is far higher than the 5.4 movies per week prior to the study
- Merely sending the email led to a dramatic increase in ratings
- Only 3.2% of a matched control group logged in during the week of the experiment
- No difference between the experimental groups regarding the likelihood of logging in at least once during the week

Study 1 Data Analysis and Results

- Emails can motivate people in an online community simply by reminding subscribers of an opportunity to contribute
- The content of the emails made a difference. Making members feel unique encouraged them to contribute more in general and especially to contribute to the areas where they were unique
- Reminding participants of the benefits that either they or others receive from contributions decreased the number of ratings they made compared to participants who received no reminders of benefit
- Telling participants simultaneously about both benefits that they and others receive led to more effort than telling them about either one alone
- Possible the emails they sent out did not sufficiently convey the types of benefit they were attempting to make salient
- Possible that strong opinions could not be swayed by short explanations in emails

Study 1 Discussion

The collective effort model identifies conditions under which people will socially loaf less:
- Believing that their effort is important to the group's performance
- Believing that their contributions to the group are identifiable
- Liking the group they are working with

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