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 [...]
I previously wrote about an interesting system of awarding “points” for contributions that IBM introduced into its social networking system. Despite explicitly not being worth anything, the points turned out to be a strong motivation to contribute more information. Unfortunately, the paper that describes this doesn’t really give any theoretical reasons why points might work [...]
Unsurprisingly, if you give people a reward for contributing to a user-contributed content system, users repond by increasing their contributions. But how much of a reward is really needed to induce contributions? The social software research team at IBM tried one of the simplest reward systems: they awarded people “points” for contributing to their internal [...]