Self-serving Bias: Why Users Love Themselves
I’ve been spending a lot of time in social psychology literature — my recent research is focused on building social systems. Why social psychology? The Levenshtein edit distance between social psychology and social computing was shorter than that for medieval european history. (Sociology came in second place.) At our meetings I am sharing bits of interesting knowledge gleaned from my studies, especially those relevant to HCI and user interfaces. Katrina blogged about one of them a couple days ago; now, it’s my turn.
Self-serving bias. What is it? In short, it characterizes our tendency to cast all information about ourselves in a positive light. We take credit for good things, and explain negatives away by blaming elements of the situation.
You’re familiar with some colloquialisms derived from this research: all drivers believe they’re a safer driver than the average driver; all businessmen believe they’re more ethical than the average businessman. Husbands tend to believe that they are doing slightly more than half the housework, whereas wives tend to believe they do more than twice as much housework as their husbands. Students who do well on a test think the test was fair; students who flunk it feel that it was not. And of course, “No, I didn’t forget to respond to your e-mail — it must have gotten caught in my spam filter!”
This work reminds me of Cliff Nass’s research on blaming computers — how a computer can either take the blame itself or try to blame the user for giving it bad input. Guess which one the user likes more? Users hate being blamed. (However, if the computer takes the blame instead, the computer tends to be viewed as less competent. A third option might be to blame an external circumstance like a noisy connection, which is nobody’s fault.)
So, what to do in social computing systems? One thought might be to offer a biased, egocentric view of your contributions. Allowing users to take credit, even for things that they participated in minimally, may drive them to actually participate! Some folks at Bob Kraut’s lab found that emphasizing the importance of a user’s contributions in a social system did in fact motivate more participation.
Why yes, your Facebook status update did get seen by more people than those of your five hundred other friends. Riiight.
- Michael Bernstein