Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities

This paper delves into the problem of under-contribution among online communities. The authors conduct several experiments on a community called MovieLens - a movie recommendation community. In an effort to test various hypotheses regarding what factors effect users’ tendencies to participate in such an online community, the authors of this paper send out emails to various users informing them of various notions and then watch their activity on the site. The results are pretty interesting.

Out of 6 hypotheses they make, one is that a user who is acknowledged by others (or in this case by the website itself) as unique is more motivated to contribute and play his/her “unique” role. Emails were sent out a random selection of users telling them that they had been selected for a campaign to rate more movies and that they were selected because they had rated movies that only 2 or 3 other users had rated. Other emails were sent out to users telling them that they’re tastes were more typical and that this made them more valuable to the community. The results were that the users who had been told that they were unique and valued rated more movies thereafter than those users who had been told that they were chosen because they’re tastes were similar to the majority of users. Specifically overall movie ratings increased 18% among the unique users than the non-unique users and when considering only the obscure movie ratings, unique users rated 40% more than non-unique users.

Although there are 5 other tested hypotheses in this paper, the lesson that can be taken away from this one is that users are more likely to contribute if they feel unique or special. Just having a site that is customized for each user (for example Amazon’s recommendation system) might not be enough. Specifically being told that you are unique makes the difference. The paper makes a good point that this kind of feature (one that tells users how unique they’re activity is) is pretty much non-existent. Whether this is a possible feature to implement is another question.