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The Perverse Effects of Social Transparency on Online Advice Taking

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Increasingly, the advice people receive on the Internet is socially transparent in the sense that it displays contextual information about the advice-givers or their actions. We hypothesize that activity transparency -seeing an advice giver's process while creating his or her recommendations - will increase advice taking. We report three experiments testing the effect of activity transparency on taking mediocre advice. We found that the presence of a web history increased the likelihood of following a financial advisor's advice and reduced participant earnings (Exp. 1), especially when the web history implied greater task focus (Exp. 2, 3). CSCW research usually emphasizes how to increase information sharing; this work suggests when shared information may be inappropriate. We suggest ways to counter activity transparency's potential downsides.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
February 2015
1956 pages
ISBN:9781450329224
DOI:10.1145/2675133
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 February 2015

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Author Tags

  1. credibility
  2. decision making
  3. information sharing
  4. online advice
  5. persuasion
  6. social transparency

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CSCW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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  • (2022)建议采纳的认知机制Advances in Psychological Science10.3724/SP.J.1042.2019.0014927:1(149-159)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Why do people donate online? A perspective from dual credibility transferInternational Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing10.1007/s12208-022-00345-320:2(393-425)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2022
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  • (2022)Persuasion in Audio‐based Social Media: A Clubhouse Interview StudyProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.74459:1(840-842)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Expanding Explainability: Towards Social Transparency in AI systemsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445188(1-19)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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