skip to main content
research-article

Better Feedback from Nicer People: Narrative Empathy and Ingroup Framing Improve Feedback Exchange

Published: 05 January 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Online feedback exchange platforms enable content creators to collect a diverse set of design feedback quickly. However, creators can experience low quality and harsh feedback when using such platforms. In this paper, we leverage the empathy of the feedback provider to address both these issues. Specifically, we tested two narrative-based empathy arousal interventions: a negative experience and a design process narrative. We also examined whether ingroup framing further enhances the effects of empathy arousal. In a 3x2 online experiment, participants (n=205) wrote feedback on a poster design after experiencing one of the intervention conditions or a control condition. Our results show both the design process narrative and ingroup framing conditions significantly increased the feedback quality and effort invested in the task. The negative experience narrative condition had similar effects and participants reported significantly increased disapproval towards harsh feedback. We discuss the implications of our results for the design of feedback exchange platforms.

References

[1]
Judd Antin and Elizabeth F. Churchill. 2011. Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. Chi 2011 (2011), 1--4.
[2]
Arthur Aron, Elaine N. Aron, and Danny Smollan. 1992. Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 63, 4 (1992), 596--612.
[3]
Richard P. Bagozzi and David J. Moore. 1994. Public Service Advertisements: Emotions and Empathy Guide Prosocial Behavior. J. Mark. 58, 1 (January 1994), 56.
[4]
Paul Baker. 2006. Moral panic and alternative identity construction in Usenet. J. Comput. Commun. 7, 1 (June 2006), 0-0.
[5]
C. Daniel Batson, Johee Chang, Ryan Orr, and Jennifer Rowland. 2002. Empathy, Attitudes, and Action: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Motivate One to Help the Group? Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 28, 12 (December 2002), 1656--1666.
[6]
C. Daniel Batson, Shannon Early, and Giovanni Salvarani. 1997. Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels Versus Imaging How You Would Feel. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 23, 7 (July 1997), 751--758.
[7]
C Daniel Batson and Nadia Ahmad. 2001. Empathy induced altruism in a prisoner?s dilemma: What if the target of empathy has defected? Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 36, January 2000 (2001), 25--36. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.26/full
[8]
Aditya Bharadwaj, Pao Siangliulue, Adam Marcus, and Kurt Luther. 2019. Critter. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19, 1--12.
[9]
Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon. 2002. Psychonarratology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
[10]
Lisa M. Brown, Margaret M. Bradley, and Peter J. Lang. 2006. Affective reactions to pictures of ingroup and outgroup members. Biol. Psychol. 71, 3 (March 2006), 303--311.
[11]
Tad T. Brunyé, Tali Ditman, Caroline R Mahoney, Jason S Augustyn, and Holly a Taylor. 2009. When You and I Share Perspectives. Psychol. Sci. 20, 1 (January 2009), 27--32.
[12]
Erin E. Buckels, Paul D. Trapnell, and Delroy L. Paulhus. 2014. Trolls just want to have fun. Pers. Individ. Dif. 67, (September 2014), 97--102.
[13]
Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Mattia Samory, Anirudh Srinivasan, and Eric Gilbert. 2017. The Bag of Communities. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17, 3175--3187.
[14]
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Anyone Can Become a Troll. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing - CSCW '17, 1217--1230.
[15]
Mina Cikara, Emile G. Bruneau, and Rebecca R. Saxe. 2011. Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 20, 3 (June 2011), 149--153.
[16]
Jonathan Cohen. 2001. Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters. Mass Commun. Soc. 4, 3 (2001), 245--264.
[17]
Amy Cook, Jessica Hammer, Salma Elsayed-Ali, and Steven Dow. 2019. How guiding questions facilitate feedback exchange in project-based learning. Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. - Proc. (2019), 1--12.
[18]
Mark H. Davis. 1983. Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 44, 1 (1983), 113--126.
[19]
Mark H. Davis. 1995. Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach. Westview Press.
[20]
Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu. 2013. Reading other minds: Effects of literature on empathy. Sci. Study Lit. 3, 1 (2013), 28--47.
[21]
Steven P Dow, Elizabeth M Gerber, and Audris Wong. 2013. A pilot study of using crowds in the classroom. CHI (2013), 227.
[22]
Nancy Eisenberg and Richard A Fabes. 1990. Empathy: Conceptualization, measurement, and relation to prosocial behavior. Motiv. Emot. 14, 2 (June 1990), 131--149.
[23]
John D. Foubert and Bradford C. Perry. 2007. Creating Lasting Attitude and Behavior Change in Fraternity Members and Male Student Athletes. Violence Against Women 13, 1 (January 2007), 70--86.
[24]
C. Ailie Fraser, Joy O. Kim, Hijung Valentina Shin, Joel Brandt, and Mira Dontcheva. 2020. Temporal Segmentation of Creative Live Streams. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1--12.
[25]
Susan Gair. 2013. Inducing Empathy: Pondering Students? (In)Ability to Empathize With an Aboriginal Man?s Lament and What Might Be Done About It. J. Soc. Work Educ. 49, 1 (January 2013), 136--149.
[26]
Sarah Gielen, Elien Peeters, Filip Dochy, Patrick Onghena, and Katrien Struyven. 2010. Improving the effectiveness of peer feedback for learning. Learn. Instr. 20, 4 (August 2010), 304--315.
[27]
William G. Graziano, Meara M. Habashi, Brad E. Sheese, and Renée M. Tobin. 2007. Agreeableness, empathy, and helping: A person × situation perspective. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 93, 4 (2007), 583--599.
[28]
Michael D Greenberg, Matthew W Easterday, and Elizabeth M Gerber. 2015. Critiki. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition - C&C '15, 235--244.
[29]
Jennifer N. Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht. 2012. Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: Neural evidence of an empathy gap. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 7, 5 (2012), 596--603.
[30]
Tyler Hamby and Wyn Taylor. 2016. Survey Satisficing Inflates Reliability and Validity Measures. Educ. Psychol. Meas. 76, 6 (December 2016), 912--932.
[31]
Christian Happ, André Melzer, and Georges Steffgen. 2011. Bringing Empathy into Play: On the Effects of Empathy in Violent and Nonviolent Video Games. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 371--374.
[32]
Grit Hein, Giorgia Silani, Kerstin Preuschoff, C. Daniel Batson, and Tania Singer. 2010. Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members? suffering predict individual differences in costly helping. Neuron 68, 1 (2010), 149--160.
[33]
Fernanda Herrera, Jeremy Bailenson, Erika Weisz, Elise Ogle, and Jamil Zaki. 2018. Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking. PLoS One 13, 10 (October 2018), e0204494.
[34]
Julie S Hui, Darren Gergle, and Elizabeth M Gerber. 2018. IntroAssist. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '18, 1--13.
[35]
Suzanne Keen. 2006. A Theory of Narrative Empathy. Narrative 14, 3 (2006), 207--236.
[36]
Peter Kollock and Marc Smith. 1996. Managing the virtual commons. 109.
[37]
Markus Krause, Tom Garncarz, JiaoJiao Song, Elizabeth M Gerber, Brian P Bailey, and Steven P Dow. 2017. Critique Style Guide. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17, 4627--4639.
[38]
Claus Lamm, C. Daniel Batson, and Jean Decety. 2007. The Neural Substrate of Human Empathy: Effects of Perspective-taking and Cognitive Appraisal. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 19, 1 (January 2007), 42--58.
[39]
Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick. 2004. Slash(dot) and burn. In Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '04, 543--550.
[40]
Zipeng Liu, Zhicheng Liu, and Tamara Munzner. 2020. Data-driven Multi-level Segmentation of Image Editing Logs. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1--12.
[41]
Peter John Loewen, Greg Lyle, and Jennifer S. Nachshen. 2010. An eight-item form of the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and an application to charitable giving. (2010), 1--14.
[42]
Kurt Luther, Jari-lee Tolentino, Wei Wu, Amy Pavel, Brian P Bailey, Maneesh Agrawala, Björn Hartmann, and Steven P Dow. 2015. Structuring, Aggregating, and Evaluating Crowdsourced Design Critique. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15, 473--485.
[43]
Xiaojuan Ma, Yu Li, Jodi Forlizzi, and Steven Dow. 2015. Exiting the design studio: Leveraging online participants for early-stage design feedback. Proc. ACM Conf. Comput. Support. Coop. Work. CSCW 2015-Janua, (2015), 676--685.
[44]
Clifford Nass, B.J. Fogg, and Youngme Moon. 1996. Can computers be teammates? Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 45, 6 (December 1996), 669--678.
[45]
Tricia J Ngoon, C Ailie Fraser, Ariel S Weingarten, Mira Dontcheva, and Scott Klemmer. 2018. Interactive Guidance Techniques for Improving Creative Feedback. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '18, 1--11.
[46]
Thi Thao Duyen T. Nguyen, Thomas Garncarz, Felicia Ng, Laura A. Dabbish, and Steven P. Dow. 2017. Fruitful Feedback. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing - CSCW '17, 1024--1034.
[47]
Amanda B. Nickerson, Ariel M. Aloe, Jennifer A. Livingston, and Thomas Hugh Feeley. 2014. Measurement of the bystander intervention model for bullying and sexual harassment. J. Adolesc. 37, 4 (June 2014), 391--400.
[48]
Keith Oatley. 1995. A taxonomy of the emotions of literary response and a theory of identification in fictional narrative. Poetics 23, 1--2 (1995), 53--74.
[49]
Patricia A. Oswald. 1996. The Effects of Cognitive and Affective Perspective Taking on Empathic Concern and Altruistic Helping. J. Soc. Psychol. 136, 5 (October 1996), 613--623.
[50]
James W Pennebaker, Ryan L Boyd, Kayla Jordan, and Kate Blackburn. 2015. The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. Austin, TX Univ. Texas Austin (2015), 1--22.
[51]
Irene Rae, Leila Takayama, and Bilge Mutlu. 2012. One of the gang. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '12, 3091.
[52]
Renate L.E.P. Reniers, Rhiannon Corcoran, Richard Drake, Nick M. Shryane, and Birgit A. Völlm. 2011. The QCAE: A questionnaire of cognitive and affective empathy. J. Pers. Assess. 93, 1 (2011), 84--95.
[53]
Paul Resnick and Richard Zeckhauser. 2002. Trust among strangers in internet transactions: Empirical analysis of eBay?s reputation system. Adv. Appl. Microeconomics 11, (2002), 127--157.
[54]
Daniela Retelny, Sébastien Robaszkiewicz, Alexandra To, Walter S. Lasecki, Jay Patel, Negar Rahmati, Tulsee Doshi, Melissa Valentine, and Michael S. Bernstein. 2014. Expert crowdsourcing with flash teams. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '14, 75--85.
[55]
Annika Richterich. 2013. 'Karma, Precious Karma'!? Karmawhoring on Reddit and the Front Page's Econometrisation. J. Peer Prod. May (2013), 1--12. Retrieved from http://peerproduction.net
[56]
Jeffrey Rzeszotarski and Aniket Kittur. 2012. CrowdScape. In Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '12, 55.
[57]
Jeffrey M Rzeszotarski and Aniket Kittur. 2011. Instrumenting the crowd. In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '11, 13.
[58]
D. Royce Sadler. 1989. Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instr. Sci. 18, 2 (June 1989), 119--144.
[59]
D. Royce Sadler. 1998. Formative Assessment: revisiting the territory. Assess. Educ. Princ. Policy Pract. 5, 1 (March 1998), 77--84.
[60]
Joseph Seering, Tianmi Fang, Luca Damasco, Mianhong Cherie Chen, Likang Sun, and Geoff Kaufman. 2019. Designing User Interface Elements to Improve the Quality and Civility of Discourse in Online Commenting Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19, 1--14.
[61]
Joseph Seering, Tianmi Fang, Luca Damasco, Mianhong Cherie Chen, Likang Sun, and Geoff Kaufman. 2019. Designing User Interface Elements to Improve the Quality and Civility of Discourse in Online Commenting Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '19, 1--14.
[62]
Jellie Sierksma, Jochem Thijs, and Maykel Verkuyten. 2015. Ingroup bias in children's intention to help can be overpowered by inducing empathy. Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 33, 1 (March 2015), 45--56.
[63]
Edgar A. Smith and J. Peter Kincaid. 1970. Derivation and Validation of the Automated Readability Index for Use with Technical Materials. Hum. Factors J. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. 12, 5 (October 1970), 457--564.
[64]
Walter G. Stephan and Krystina Finlay. 1999. The Role of Empathy in Improving Intergroup Relations. J. Soc. Issues 55, 4 (January 1999), 729--743.
[65]
Stefan Stürmer, Mark Snyder, Alexandra Kropp, and Birte Siem. 2006. Empathy-Motivated Helping: The Moderating Role of Group Membership. Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 32, 7 (July 2006), 943--956.
[66]
Mark Tarrant, Sarah Dazeley, and Tom Cottom. 2009. Social categorization and empathy for outgroup members. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 48, 3 (September 2009), 427--446.
[67]
Yla R. Tausczik and James W. Pennebaker. 2010. The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods. J. Lang. Soc. Psychol. 29, 1 (March 2010), 24--54.
[68]
Matthew J. Traxler and Morton Ann Gernsbacher. 1993. Improving written communication through perspective-taking. Lang. Cogn. Process. 8, 3 (August 1993), 311--334.
[69]
Theresa K. Vescio, Gretchen B. Sechrist, and Matthew P. Paolucci. 2003. Perspective taking and prejudice reduction: the mediational role of empathy arousal and situational attributions. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 33, 4 (July 2003), 455--472.
[70]
Helen Wauck, Yu-Chun (Grace) Yen, Wai-Tat Fu, Elizabeth Gerber, Steven P. Dow, and Brian P. Bailey. 2017. From in the Class or in the Wild? In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17, 5580--5591.
[71]
Drika Weller and Kristin Hansen Lagattuta. 2013. Helping the In-Group Feels Better: Children?s Judgments and Emotion Attributions in Response to Prosocial Dilemmas. Child Dev. 84, 1 (January 2013), 253--268.
[72]
Y. Wayne Wu and Brian P. Bailey. 2018. Soften the Pain, Increase the Gain. Proc. ACM Human-Computer Interact. 2, CSCW (November 2018), 1--20.
[73]
Y Wayne Wu and Brian P Bailey. 2016. Novices Who Focused or Experts Who Didn't' In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '16, 4086--4097.
[74]
Y Wayne Wu and Brian P Bailey. 2017. Bitter Sweet or Sweet Bitter? In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition - C&C '17, 137--147.
[75]
W Xiong, D. Litman, and C. Schunn. 2012. Natural Language Processing techniques for researching and improving peer feedback. J. Writ. Res. 4, 2 (November 2012), 155--176.
[76]
Anbang Xu, Shih-wen Huang, and Brian Bailey. 2014. Voyant. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing - CSCW '14, 1433--1444.
[77]
Anbang Xu, Huaming Rao, Steven P. Dow, and Brian P. Bailey. 2015. A Classroom Study of Using Crowd Feedback in the Iterative Design Process. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15, 1637--1648.
[78]
Koji Yatani, Michael Novati, Andrew Trusty, and Khai N. Truong. 2011. Review spotlight. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '11, 1541.
[79]
Yu-Chun Grace Yen, Steven P. Dow, Elizabeth Gerber, and Brian P. Bailey. 2016. Social Network, Web Forum, or Task Market? In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems - DIS '16, 773--784.
[80]
Alvin Yuan, Kurt Luther, Markus Krause, Sophie Isabel Vennix, Steven P Dow, and Björn Hartmann. 2016. Almost an Expert: The Effects of Rubrics and Expertise on Perceived Value of Crowdsourced Design Critiques. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '16, 1003--1015.
[81]
Holm's Sequential Bonferroni Procedure. In Encyclopedia of Research Design. SAGE Publications, Inc., 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks California 91320 United States.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Situating Empathy in HCI/CSCW: A Scoping ReviewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870528:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Aligning Crowdworker Perspectives and Feedback Outcomes in Crowd-Feedback System DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35794567:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Toward Inclusive Mindsets: Design Opportunities to Represent Neurodivergent Work Experiences to Neurotypical Co-Workers in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581399(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Better Feedback from Nicer People: Narrative Empathy and Ingroup Framing Improve Feedback Exchange

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 4, Issue CSCW3
    CSCW
    December 2020
    1825 pages
    EISSN:2573-0142
    DOI:10.1145/3446568
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    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]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 05 January 2021
    Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue CSCW3

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. design feedback
    2. empathy
    3. ingroup framing

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • IIS
    • NSF CMMI

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)76
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Situating Empathy in HCI/CSCW: A Scoping ReviewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870528:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2023)Aligning Crowdworker Perspectives and Feedback Outcomes in Crowd-Feedback System DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35794567:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Toward Inclusive Mindsets: Design Opportunities to Represent Neurodivergent Work Experiences to Neurotypical Co-Workers in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581399(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)StoryChat: Designing a Narrative-Based Viewer Participation Tool for Live Streaming ChatroomsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580912(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Analytically Integratable Zero-restlength Springs for Capturing Dynamic Modes unrepresented by Quasistatic Neural NetworksACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Conference Proceedings10.1145/3528233.3530705(1-9)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2022

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media