The existence and survival of online virtual organizations depends upon the commitment and retention of their members.

I am the Principal Investigator of an NSF VOSS grant on ‘Building Social Attachment in Virtual Groups’ (Award #0943159), with co-PIs Robert Kraut (Carnegie Mellon University) and Tom Postmes (University of Groningen) investigating alternative ways of designing online sites to increase commitment to virtual organizations based on social science theories of attachment. In a series of experiments within different virtual settings we are varying features of the groups that social science theory predicts will promote different forms of attachment and examining their influence on member participation and retention. Our results help inform the design of virtual groups and online communities to foster member commitment.

Check out our project website where you can find more information about the project goals, team, and publications.

This summer I presented our ongoing research on designing for commitment to online groups at the sixth annual conference of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup 2011), July 21-23rd in Minneapolis, MN:

Dabbish, L., Kraut, R., & Patton, J. Should I stay or should I go? Depends on how you talk to me: Communication and team commitment. Presentation at the Sixth Annual INGRoup Conference, July 21st-23rd in Minneapolis, MN.

In this work, we examined the role of communication in fostering commitment to a group. Previous work in organizational psychology has demonstrated a positive correlation between communication and organizational and team commitment. This previous work has largely been cross-sectional and survey-based. As a result, it remains unclear whether communication fosters commitment by getting people involved (being talked to leads to talking which ultimately creates commitment) or creating a social environment (being talked to is enough). We conducted a study in a massively multiplayer online game, where participants were randomly assigned to a group with a confederate. We varied the type of talk (silent, talked about on task things or talked about off task things) and the role of the person doing the talking (leader or peer). Our results suggest that both on task and off task communication fosters commitment by creating a certain environment (versus as a function of the participants own talk).

If you are interested in a copy of the working paper, please send me an email.

Today is the kickoff meeting for COASTE, the Center on Architecting Socio-Technical Ecosystems, a planned Industry/University Collaborative Research Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The center will join leading researchers in socio-technical systems, software architecture, open source software, network science, and collaboration technologies to work with member organizations to rapidly uncover social, technical, and organizational principles to shape a new scientific perspective that will guide effective ecosystem design.

How do cues in our digital environment influence our attention? How do we use these cues to make sense of others behavior?
I have been examining these questions in my recent research.

I presented two related papers at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011) in Vancouver, BC May 6th to the 12th:

Dabbish, L., Mark, G., & Gonzales, V. (2011). Why do I keep interrupting myself?: Self-interruption, habit, and environment. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), Vancouver, CA.

In this note, we examined whether environmental factors and individual differences influence the amount of self-interruption by information workers across three organizational settings.

Wainer, J., Dabbish, L., & Kraut, R. (2011). Should I open this email?: Curiosity and attention to email messages. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), Vancouver, CA.

In this paper, we examined attention to email messages. We found that curiosity strongly increased the likelihood of reading certain messages over others. Curiosity was generated by partial information at the inbox level and operated in a largely intrinsic way, diminished by salient cues of message value and cognitive demand.

Before the conference started, my students and I also participated in two great workshops.

At the workshop on Personal Informatics & HCI: Design, Theory, & Social Implications I talked about SeeMail (Dabbish, L., & Wise, Z. (2011). SeeMail: Visualizing Email Response.) a system we’ve created to give users an overview of their email behavior over time. The visualizations support inferences about relationship strength, norms, and attention allocation.

At the workshop on Transnational HCI, my PhD student Jennifer Marlow presented our work applying construal theory to inform interventions that reduce psychological distance in distributed teams: (Marlow, J. & Dabbish, L. (2011). Reducing Psychological Distance in Distributed Teams.).

It was a great conference and I’m looking forward to CHI 2012 in Austin, Texas!

How can we foster social connection with distant others? We have two publications at the 2011 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011) exploring this issue:

Marlow, J. & Dabbish, L. (2011). Photosharing in diverse distributed teams. To appear in proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011), Hangzhou, China.

This note with my PhD student Jennifer Marlow describes a study suggesting that sharing photos highlighting similarities with distant others promotes prosocial behavior.

Farzan, R., Dabbish, L., Kraut, R., & Postmes, T. (2011). Increasing commitment to online communities by designing for social presence. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011), Hangzhou, China.

This paper describes a set of studies examining how individual versus team focused designs promote member attachment. Our results suggest that sites that want to encourage social interaction among members should increase the visibility of individual identities in the context of a team.

Online first! Paul Goodman and I have an article forthcoming in the journal ‘Small Group Research’ tackling the sticky issue of measuring group learning.

Goodman, P., & Dabbish, L. (Forthcoming). Methodological issues in measuring group learning. Small Group Research. [Pre-print available for download here]

In the paper we review methodology employed in a selection of previous work on group learning, and consider whether these approaches truly capture learning at the group level of analysis. We provide recommendations for research on learning at the group level.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can access our article online first (before it appears in print) at the SGR website here.