In recent years, several organizations have implemented non-mandatory information and communication systems that escape the conventional behavioral logic of understanding acceptance and usage from a normative perspective of compliance with the beliefs of others. Because voluntary systems require users' volitional behavior, researchers have traced recent implementation failures to a lack of user commitment. However, gaps in our understanding of volitional usage behavior and user commitment have made it difficult to advance theory, research, and practice on this issue. To validate a proposed research model, cross-sectional, between-subjects, and within-subjects field data were collected from 714 users at the time of initial adoption and after six months of extended use. The model explained between 44.1% and 58.5% of the variance in adoption and usage behavior based upon direct effects of user commitment. Findings suggest that user commitment plays a critical role in the volitional acceptance and usage of such systems. Affective commitment, i.e., internalization and identification based upon personal norms, exhibits a sustained positive influence on usage behavior. In contrast, continuance commitment, i.e., compliance based upon social norms, shows a sustained negative influence from initial adoption to extended use. Theory development based upon Kelman's social influence framework offers new empirical insights about system users' commitment and how it affects volitional usage behavior.

We introduce the use of negative preferences to produce solutions that are acceptable to a group of users. This technique takes advantage of the fact that discovering what a user does not like can be easier than discovering what the user does like. To illustrate the approach, we implemented Adaptive Radio, a system that selects music to play in a shared environment. Rather than attempting to play the songs that users want to hear, the system avoids playing songs that they do not want to hear. Negative preferences could potentially be applied to information filtering, intelligent environments, and collaborative design. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.3 [Information interfaces and presentation]: Group and organization interfaces—collaborative computing, computer-supported cooperative work

When people make choices within a group, they are frequently influenced by the choices made by others. We have experimentally explored the general phenomenon of group behavior where an early action facilitates subsequent actions. Our concrete instantiation of this problem is group path formation where people travel between destinations with the travel cost for moving onto a location inversely related to the frequency with which the location has been visited by others. We compare the resulting paths to optimal solutions (Minimal Steiner Trees - MST) and the "Active Walker" model of pedestrian motion from biophysics [1]. There were systematic deviations from beeline pathways in the direction of MST. These deviations showed asymmetries (people took different paths from A to B than they did from B to A), and varied as a function of the topology of the destinations, the duration of travel, and the absolute scale of the world. The Active Walker model accounted for many of these results, in a...

Abstract not found

How and why the presence of a person directly affects the perception and action of another person is a phenomenon that has been approached in a limited and piecemeal fashion within psychology. This kind of diffuse strategy has failed to capture the jointness of perception and action within and between people. In contradistinction, the authors offer a perspective that retains both integrally social features (e.g., involves interaction) and yet adequately exploits the current state of knowledge regarding the ecological properties of perception–action, while at the same time drawing on aspects of dynamic systems theory. In this article the authors review the best attempts to examine how one individual affects another’s perceptions and actions in the emergence of a social unit of action. Two important approaches, the individual-level and cognitive dynamics approaches, have yielded insights that derive in significant degree from principles of ecological psychology and/or dynamical systems theory. Prototypic of the individual-level approach is a focus on what can be perceived by coactors with the aim of uncovering how the dispositional qualities (affordances) of another person are informationally specified during social interaction. In contrast, the cognitive dynamics approach simulates dynamical characteristics of cognition and psychological influence with the aim of uncovering how cooperative interaction emerges out of its component parts. The authors argue that these approaches involve, respectively, insufficient mutuality and insufficient embodiment. Consequently, a social synergy perspective is discussed that approaches the problem of socially cooperative interaction at the relational, nonreductive level, using novel methods to examine how social perception and action emerge through self-organizing processes.

A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one’s judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another person. The authors note that people tend to use 2 basic strategies when revising estimates: choosing between the 2 estimates and averaging them. The authors developed the probability, accuracy, redundancy (PAR) model to examine the relative effectiveness of these two strategies across judgment environments. A surprising result was that averaging was the more effective strategy across a wide range of commonly encountered environments. The authors observed that despite this finding, people tend to favor the choosing strategy. Most participants in these studies would have achieved greater accuracy had they always averaged. The identification of intuitive strategies, along with a formal analysis of when they are accurate, provides a basis for examining how effectively people use the judgments of others. Although a portfolio of strategies that includes averaging and choosing can be highly effective, the authors argue that people are not generally well adapted to the environment in terms of strategy selection.

Collaborative writing (CW) in policy agenda setting and grant development is an important aspect of community development. However, solutions need to be found to better deal with distributed CW. This paper establishes a basis for improving distributed, CW for policy agenda setting, and similar efforts, by using a Internet-based collaborative tool. This work utilizes key research to better understand the constructs and potential outcomes of CW. Findings include that using Collaboratus for distributed CW can provide significant improvements over traditional methods, potentially benefiting those involved in distributed rural community development initiatives and similar efforts.

Social navigation is a promising approach for supporting privacy and security management. By aggregating and presenting the choices made by others, social navigation systems can provide users with easily understandable guidance on security and privacy decisions, rather than requiring that they understand low-level technical details in order to make informed decisions. We have developed two prototype systems to explore how social navigation can help users manage their privacy and security. The Acumen system employs social navigation to address a common privacy activity, managing Internet cookies, and the Bonfire system uses social navigation to help users manage their personal firewall. Our experiences with Acumen and Bonfire suggest that, despite the promise of social navigation, there are significant challenges in applying these techniques to the domains of end-user privacy and security management. Due to features of these domains, individuals may misuse community data when making decisions, leading to incorrect individual decisions, inaccurate community data, and “herding ” behavior that is an example of what economists term an informational cascade. By understanding this phenomenon in these terms, we develop and present two general approaches for mitigating herding in social navigation systems that support end-user security and privacy management, mitigation via algorithms and mitigation via user interaction. Mitigation via user interaction is a novel and promising approach to mitigating cascades in social navigation systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.3 [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Group and Organizational Interfaces- collaborative computing, theory and models. K4.1 [Computers and Society]: Public Policy Issues – privacy.

For information about citing this article, click here

The emergence of service-learning in higher education and the renewed emphasis on community involvement presents colleges and universities with opportunities to develop campus-community partnerships for the common good. These partnerships can leverage both campus and community resources to address critical issues in local communities. Campus-community partnerships are a series of interpersonal relationships between (a) campus administrators, faculty, staff, and students and (b) community leaders, agency personnel, and members of communities. The phases of relationships (i.e., initiation, development, maintenance, dissolution) and the dynamics of relationships (i.e., exchanges, equity, distribution of power) are explored to provide service-learning instructors and campus personnel with a clearer understanding of how to develop healthy campus-community partnerships. Historical context, institutional missions, and external expectations for knowledge and expertise have influenced the involvement of American higher education in communities. Higher education has demonstrated community involvement in many ways, including (a) cooperative extension and continuing education programs, (b) clinical and pre-professional programs, (c) top-down administrative initiatives, (d) centralized administrative-academic units with outreach missions, (e) faculty professional service, (f) student volunteer initiatives, (g) economic and political outreach, (h) community access to facilities and cultural events, and most recently, (i) service-learning classes (Thomas, 1998). Unfortunately, however, history has contained too many instances of institutions of higher education treating communities as “pockets of needs, laboratories for experimentation, or passive ∗Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert G. Bringle, Department