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Social Loafing, Free Riding, and Online Communities
psychology, society & sociology
September 10, 2003, 11:25 PM
In CSCW / Designing Online Communities last week, we read, processed, and discussed a huge volume of empirical studies literature on the problem of free riding and social loafing. These two concepts describe the same basic phenomenon except that the first is an economics term and the second is a social science term. Some may quibble with details, but essentially both refer to the observation that people tend to contribute less to a common effort when they are in groups than they do to their individual efforts. The presence of others, it appears, causes contribution and productivity to drop. My earlier post about empirical research on free riding examined one of these studies, now I'm going to try to distill something out of all of them.
Examining this issue is important for online communities, since all of them are, to some degree or another, a common, public good. All require some sort of member participation to stay alive; email lists and discussion groups require people to provide new posts, weblogs require the author to add new entries and possibly readers to add comments or send feedback, online games require a number of people willing to play seriously and fair. And an issue that may touch the hearts of many community administrators is that of donations; the question of how to get your thousands of readers to donate those two cents or whatever it takes to keep your community/webcomic/magazine/etc. alive has free riding / social loafing written all over it.
And so we start by asking: when do people loaf / free ride, and when do they not?
Social Science
To examine the social science perspective on the problem, we read a "Karau & Williams", a formal meta-analysis of several empirical studies on social loafing. For the masochistic, the full reference is: Karau, S. & Williams, K. (1993) Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706. After slogging through the dry prose and statistics, I gleaned the following information from the article.
Social loafing is decreased by the following factors:
- Evaluation potential - if there is a chance that people will be evaluated on their individual contributions to the group, they are less likely to loaf.
- Task valence - if the task the participants are engaging in as a group is considered inherently interesting to them, they are less likely to loaf ("valence" is psychology lingo for an individual's feelings of attraction or aversion to a particular object or event).
- Group valence - if the participants feel a positive attraction or a sense of loyalty, commitment, or camaraderie towards the group, they are less likely to loaf.
- Opportunity for group evaluation - if the group's performance will be evaluated at a predetermined point, that group's participants are less likely to loaf.
- Individual is unique - if the individual feels they are the only one in the group that can provide a particular service or complete a particular task, then they are less likely to loaf.
- Female sex & Eastern culture - Easterners are less likely to loaf than westerners, and, for some reason, women are less likely to loaf than men.
- Task complexity - Participants are less likely to loaf if the task is quite complex than they are if the task is simple.
On the other side, social loafing is increased by the following factors:
- Greater number in group - the more people there are in a group, the more loafing will occur.
- Low expectations of coworkers - if participants thought their coworkers were incompetent, they were more likely to loaf. This contradicts the assumption that competent people will work harder to compensate for their less competent coworkers.
- Adult participants - for some reason, adults loaf more than children. Maybe loafing is a learned skill. Matt likes to talk about "skilled incompetence"; maybe this is related.
Economics
For the economic perspective, we read "Ledyard", which isn't a formal meta-analysis but is a smart guy who read a bunch of papers and tried to pull all the data together. Here's the reference: Ledyard, J. (1995). Public goods: A survey of experimental research. In J. H. Kagel & A. Roth (Eds.), The handbook of experimental economics (pp. 111-194.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. and here's the insights:
Free riding is decreased by the following factors:
- High marginal per-capita return (MPCR) - the MPCR is the amount of utility an individual expects to get back from contributing to a public good. Consider the game I discussed earlier; if the per-person return for investing in Group Exchange is 25 cents, people are less likely to contribute than if it is 75 cents.
- Common knowledge of who contributes - if everyone else can see how much you are contributing or withholding (and you can, in turn, see everyone else's contributions) everyone is more likely to contribute more to the public good.
- Everyone starts equal - if everyone starts out with an equal amount of money, people are less likely to free ride than they are if the initial distribution of funds is uneven.
- Donation threshold - if some form of threshold is in place (think of campaign contribution targets, for instance, or dollar-amount goals for cancer research fund-raisers) then this reduces free-riding. However, putting a threshold in place reduces the likelihood that the threshold will actually be reached. I don't entirely understand how this works.
- Friendship / group identification - Similar to the "group valence" finding in the social science article, if all the people in the group are friends or otherwise identify with the collective, then they are less likely to free ride.
- Communication allowed - if the members of the group are allowed to communicate with one another before playing the game, then they are less likely to free ride (even though theoretical economics like Prisoner's Dilemma strategies claim that communication is irrelevant).
Yep, you saw it coming. Free riding is increased by:
- Repeated games - if the game is played over and over again, people are more likely to free ride in later games than they are in earlier games.
- Economics training - people trained in economics are more likely to free ride than those who are not. Perhaps because they are familiar with the "optimal strategies" already.
- Experience playing the game - people who have participated in game theory economics experiments before are more likely to free ride than those who are not.
- Vote for contributions - this refers to an alteration in the game where, after the total amount is collected and the individual knows how much he stands to make or lose, everyone votes to determine if the contributions are applied to the public good or if the good is dissolved and the contributions are returned to their original owners. Although you'd think this would discourage free riding, apparently it only makes it worse.
Well, that was fun. Now the question becomes: How do we take all these facts and turn them into practical design recommendations for online community developers? Stay tuned, I hope...
Email Rob:
Of Moods, Taxonomies, and Exploration in Design
aesthetics, design
September 09, 2003, 10:55 PM
For the last week and a half or so, I've been hard at work for my Visual Interface and Interaction Design (VIID) class developing two sets of artifacts: four mechanical product taxonomies and seven "mood boards". In theory, all this work is supposed to lead to ideas for our first assignment: to develop vignettes for a new scheduling application. There are very few constraints, but Jodi seems to want us to explore radical ideas instead of sticking to old hat; for instance, last year Abby did a "schedule ball" that let you set appointments by turning its two halves in different ways. Another student made a piece of ribbon that represented time and that you could pull from its spool and mark with pins to represent appointments.
If you take a look at my taxonomies, you'll find we were asked to examine a few physical, mechanical products and describe how users interact with them, how the products' parts responded to this interaction, what sort of affordances they provided, etc. I found this really forced me to sit down and think about these common artifacts in a way I generally never do; I started to realize why we know (or don't know) how to use them fairly intuitively.
For my mood boards (warning: ginormous 9MB pdf), I took the seven words Jodi gave us, then brainstormed some other words that came to mind when I thought about those concepts. I picked four of these "attributes" for each board and searched for pictures that I thought exemplified their meanings. In the end, I found that three pictures wasn't really enough to capture the meanings of these broad concepts (duh), so instead I put in images that I felt gave enough of a sense of the contrasts within each attribute that I could reflect on the range of thoughts and emotions I associate with each.
So far going through the process of doing these exercises hasn't helped me to come up with any brilliant ideas for the actual scheduling application. Abby, however, assures me that this will come in time. The extent of my thinking so far is that I want to come up with some ideas for a scheduling application that might appear in my Distributed Future scenario, but whether that will pan out or not, I can't yet say.
Email Rob:
Operating System Learnability and the Digital Divide
society & sociology, usability
September 07, 2003, 04:23 PM
Dan has a post about how Macs aren't any more intuitive to use than PCs, at least in his opinion.
I'd have to say, after a year of using a Mac and several years of using PCs, that I can't see where all the hoopla over Mac OS being more usable than Windows came from. Both have their strengths and weaknesses (Mac OSs tends to be better at Just Working™, whereas Windows tends to be better at giving you meaningful feedback when it doesn't; Mac OS has slighly more sensible metaphors with its emphasis on drag-and-drop and files-as-objects, whereas Windows has many more features to help out expert performance), but overall, I'd agree with Dan's assessment that both OSes are probably still pretty tough for the novice user to grok. Unless someone can show me some hard data from summative learnability evaluations comparing equivalent tasks in both Operating Systems, I'm going to remain unconvinced.
Dan said something else interesting, though. I quote:
Yes, we are raising a group of hyperwired kids (my daughter can click and drag with a mouse to play games on the computer at age 2), but there's probably a huge underserved market out there who could use some sort of operating system that was powerful enough to run what they need and yet be hassle free: the elderly, the very young, the uneducated. These people, however, are also often poor. Which is probably why this hasn't happened yet.
I've been wondering, recently, if learnability will eventually become "obsolete". As Dan points out, the younger generations are becoming much more familiar with technology at a much earlier age. Does this mean that, in the future, systems won't have to be as learnable, since they can count on a user population that is generally computer-saavy? (Note that usability will still be important, since it is so much more than ease-of-use.) And what about the poor and uneducated? Will they just slip further behind as the rich are elevated to digerati and high-tech products become more complex and esoteric?
Things to think about.
Posted by Jeff on September 07, 2003 at 06:30 PM
First, a few references that discuss consistency of interface as it relates to learnability. About Face by Alan Cooper, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design by Brenda Laurel, and Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini.
Ensuring that programs behave in predictable ways (and that the computer will continue to predictably interpret human inputs) is a key to learning a system. Historically, the Macintosh Interface Guidelines were more rigidly enforced because of the smaller nature of the development community (compared to Windows developers). This led (at least in the pre OSX days) to more consistent application interfaces (except of course for the rogue Kai's Power Tools).
Another element that could arguably effect learnability is the one button versus two button mouse. On the Mac, clicking involves only one decision. On the PC, clicking involves at least two, each with arbitrary mappings. Harder to learn, but more efficient once learned.
This is important, because although learnability is important for beginners, few people wish to remain a beginner for very long. "Most users cross into a perpetual state of adequacy striving for fluency, with their skills ebbing and flowing like the tides, depending on how frequently they use the program." Cooper 484
Once they get to that state, fundamental differences in the operating systems still have an effect on performance. Tog examines the differences (not quite empirically) between Windows and Macs as they relate to Fitts Law:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
Finally, Don Norman asserts (in TAoHCID) that a Nintendo is superior in learnability and usability to pretty much every operating system, demonstrating the trade-off of developing a generalized OS.
Posted by Dan on September 10, 2003 at 08:27 AM
One point I made badly in my post is that the two operating systems aren't just bad for beginners. They are bad for non-power users too. The intermediates.
I'd love to see the Don Norman Nintendo article.
Email Rob:
Advanced Software Design Seminar
software development, teaching & learning
September 07, 2003, 01:22 PM
Abby and I had what I believe is a really great idea for a course to run here at CMU (or elsewhere, for that matter). I'm afraid it won't have a chance to see the light of day, but I'm posting about it here anyway.
The course would be called "Advanced Software Design Seminar" or something similar, and, as the name suggests, it would be run in a seminar-style. Each student would have a fairly large (perhaps on the order of 4 to 6,000 lines) software system that they'd be responsible for working on over the course of the semester (whether they finished it or not might not actually be as important as it sounds). This system could either be something they're doing for work or another class, or it could be something they made up. What's most important is that each student is excited about his or her own project.
The class would consist of weekly meetings where everyone would review the artifacts of everyone else's work: the architecture and detailed designs, the source code, the user interface, the documentation, etc. Essentially, we'd be aiming for something similar to doing a design critique for software development. Whether this would mean using more formal procedures like ATAMs or code walkthroughs or just putting up stuff and letting people comment, I'm not sure.
If there's time and interest, the course could also involve having individual students research particular user interface software technologies and development processes and methodologies, present their findings to the class, and lead a discussion on the possible applicability of the technique to real-world projects. This is secondary to the main goal, however, of helping students get experience in building a large software system in an environment where they can receive peer reviews and feedback, as well as have a chance to revise their system to correct their mistakes. To facilitate this kind of learning, the course would have to stay small; definitely below small group sizes (less than 12) and probably practically no more than 5 or 6 students.
I think it would be a fun course, and if there's significant interest from other students I'd even be willing to hunt down a prof to facilitate it. Drop me a line if this interests you.
Email Rob:
Posted by lon urfano on January 24, 2004 at 02:08 AM
i liked your article.
what can you say about social loafing having an influence on problem solving skills?
Posted by ghanry yu on January 31, 2004 at 06:57 AM
very brief and concise
Posted by shaileja on November 21, 2005 at 01:59 AM
i like your article
though i would like to see the complete research by the help of the scale as well.
Posted by shaileja on February 10, 2006 at 01:22 AM
Respected Sir,
I am a hotel mamnagement student and currently doing a
dissertation on Social Loafing.
Sir i would like to request you to provide me as much
data possible on social loafing in successful completion of my research.
Your kind assistance will be appreciated.
Thanking you
Shaileja Nema
email id:shaileja_nema@hotmail.com