I’ve been doing a lot of driving recently, and since it is the summer (aka orange barrel season), I’ve driven through a lot of work zones. All highway work zones have one thing in common: they have a set of signs that (it seems to me) are designed to induce drivers to slow down. Slowing [...]
Tagged TrafficIt has been a while, but a lot has happened in my life. The biggest thing that happened is that I got a new job. Starting August 15th, I will be an assistant professor (tenure-track) at Michigan State University. I have a joint appointment in the Department of Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media, [...]
Many social sciences use a model of “rational actors” that completely think through options and make decisions consistent with their preferences. This model of human decision making is particularly prevalent in the field of economics, where it underlies most of the results and thinking. However, many other social scientists strongly dislike this model of decision making, arguing that it is has unrealistic expectations on humans and is demonstrably false. What follows is some of my thoughts about the utility and usefulness of the rational actor model of human decision making. As a theory of human decision making, the rational actor model is certainly not perfect. It does not explain how decisions are made, and it doesn’t accurately describe all human decisions. However, it is a very useful model of behavior because it provides strong and simple guidance on how to think through decisions in a way that provides reasonable and relatively accurate predictions about complicated human behaviors.
I’ve written before about the bootstrapping problem for social media systems: if people are coming to the site because of the content, how do you draw the first users in? Bootstrapping social media is a classic instance of a positive network effects problem: how do I get enough people to start using my system such [...]
I recently attended a talk by the social psychologist Robert Cialdini. He specializes in “influence” — how to get people to do things. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear he is actually a professor of Marketing at Arizona State University. He has spent his career studying how to influence people, and has even written [...]
A lot of my research can be seen as look at the effects of various types of technical interventions on social media systems. I change something about a social media system, and I look to see how people act differently. There are many different ways of trying to predict what will happen, but in [...]
Farmville is a very popular game that can be found on Facebook. In this game, you are given a plot of land on which you can purchase and plant all kinds of crops; the more crops you plant and harvest the more types of crops (and other goodies) you can purchase for later. In the last [...]
As social computing systems grow, it becomes increasingly important to institute some sort of site management or governance. Site governance work is important to help keep the site working smoothly as many new people with many new motives and agendas use the site. Wikipedia is famous for making public its large quantity of [...]
Tagged governanceI recently got an iPhone, and I don’t know how I lived without it. For the not-so-brief period of time that I didn’t have Internet at home, it was my lifeline connecting me to my Email and my distant wife. One of the fun things about the iPhone is the App Store. You can browse [...]
Designing social computing systems / social media systems is difficult. This is at least partially because our existing design strategies don’t work very well for the extremely-social systems like Facebook or delicious.com. The basic problem comes from trying to straightforwardly apply user-centered design. You certainly can put a user in a lab and watch them [...]
Tagged ICD