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The Effect of Performance Feedback on Social Media Sharing at Volunteer-Based Online Experiment Platforms

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

As an alternative to online labor markets, several platforms recruit unpaid online volunteers to participate in behavioral experiments that provide personalized feedback. These platforms rely on word-of-mouth sharing by previous participants for recruitment of new participants. We analyzed the impact of performance feedback provided at the end of an experiment on 81,131 participants' sharing behavior. We show that higher performing participants share significantly more. We also show that self-verification has a moderating effect: people who expected to do poorly are not affected by a high score, but people who expected to do as well as others or better, are. In a second experiment, we evaluate three distinct social comparison designs for the presentation of the results. As expected, the design that most emphasized participants' relative success led to most sharing. Contrary to our expectations, people who expected to do poorly benefited from the most optimistic social comparison more than participants who expected to do better than others.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    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 the author(s) 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: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. self-evaluation
    2. social comparison
    3. volunteer-based online experiments

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    • (2024)Selective Information Sharing and Group DelusionSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4827884Online publication date: 2024
    • (2023)Blueprints: Systematizing Behavior Change Designs—The Case of Social Comparison TheoryACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/361736431:1(1-32)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023
    • (2023)Accuracy and Reliability of At-Home Quantification of Motor Impairments Using a Computer-Based Pointing Task with Children with Ataxia-TelangiectasiaACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/358179016:1(1-25)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
    • (2022)Do People Engage Cognitively with AI? Impact of AI Assistance on Incidental LearningProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3490099.3511138(794-806)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
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    • (2020)Conducting online virtual environment experiments with uncompensated, unsupervised samplesPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.022762915:1(e0227629)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2020
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    • (2019)A thousand studies for the price of one: Accelerating psychological science with PushkinBehavior Research Methods10.3758/s13428-018-1155-z51:4(1782-1803)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2019
    • (2019)Computer Mouse Use Captures Ataxia and Parkinsonism, Enabling Accurate Measurement and DetectionMovement Disorders10.1002/mds.2791535:2(354-358)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
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