Online communities depend upon the commitment and voluntary participation of their members. Community design—site navigation, community structure and features, and organizational policies—is critical in this regard. Community design affects how people can interact, the information they receive about one another and the community, and how they can participate in community activities. We argue that the constraints and opportunities inherent in online community design influence how people become attached to the community and whether they are willing to expend effort on its behalf. We examine two theories of group attachment and link these theories with design decisions for online communities. Common identity theory makes predictions about the causes and consequences of people’s attachment to the group as a whole. Common bond theory makes predictions about the causes and consequences of people’s attachment to individual group members. We review causes of common identity and common bond, and show how they result in different kinds of attachment and group outcomes. We then show how design decisions, such as those focused on recruiting newcomers versus retaining existing members, constraining or promoting off-topic discussion, and limiting group size or allowing uncontrolled growth, can lead to common identity or interpersonal bonds among community members, and consequently to different levels and forms of community participation by those so motivated.

: Social Sciences are increasingly interested in understanding the characteristics of Computer Mediated Communication and its effects on people, groups and organisations. The first effect of this influence is the revolution in the metaphors used to describe communication. After describing these changes, the paper outlines a framework for the study of computer-mediated communication and considers the three psychosocial roots of the process by which interaction between users is constructed -- networked reality, virtual conversation and identity construction. The paper also considers the implications of these changes for current research in communication studies, with particular reference to the role of context, the link between cognition and interaction, and the use of interlocutory models as paradigms of communicative interaction: communication is not only -- or not so much -- a transfer of information, but also the activation of a psychosocial relationship, the process by which interlo...

A reconceptualization of stigma is presented that changes the emphasis from the devaluation of an individual's identity to the process by which individuals who satisfy certain criteria come to be excluded from various kinds of social interactions. The authors propose that phenomena currently placed under the general rubric of stigma involve a set of distinct psychological systems designed by natural selection to solve specific problems associated with sociality. In particular, the authors suggest that human beings possess cognitive adaptations designed to cause them to avoid poor social exchange partners, join cooperative groups (for purposes of between-group competition and exploitation), and avoid contact with those who are differentially likely to carry communicable pathogens. The evolutionary view contributes to the current conceptualization of stigma by providing an account of the ultimate function of Stigmatization and helping to explain its consensual nature.

doi 10.1287/isre.1080.0193

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of Alice, a chatterbot designed in order to elicit anthropomorphic attributions and emotional reactions from those who chat to `her'. The analysis is based on both transcripts of the interaction and user comments collected in a focus group. Results suggest that the introduction of explicit anthropomorphism in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) is a complex phenomenon, which could generate strong negative reactions from the part of the user. The finding also demonstrates the importance of placing the development of user interfaces within a social framework as the technology tends to establish relationships with users.

To increase their revenue from electronic commerce, more and more Internet businesses are soliciting personal information from consumers so as to target products and services at the right consumers. But when deciding whether to disclose their personal information to Internet businesses, consumers may weigh the concerns of giving up information privacy against the benefits of information disclosure. This paper examines how Internet businesses can motivate consumers to disclose their personal information. Based on a synthesis of the literature, it identifies seven types of extrinsic or intrinsic benefits that Internet businesses can provide when soliciting personal information from consumers. Through comprehensive conceptual and empirical validation processes, it develops an instrument that allows Internet businesses to gauge the preference of consumers for the various types of benefits. By testing a set of nomological networks, it offers some ideas to Internet businesses about what types of benefits may be more effective given the personality traits of consumer populations. Besides providing a foundation for efforts at developing theories on information privacy and information disclosure, the results of this research provide useful suggestions to Internet businesses on how best to solicit personal information from consumers. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Key words: privacy, Internet business, information disclosure, extrinsic benefit, intrinsic benefit, personality, confirmatory factor analysis. We gratefully thank all participants in the 2002 NUS summer research workshop and the 2002 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). We also thank Ee-Cheah Tam for her contributions to a previous version of this manuscript, and Juan-Juan Han for her research

this article, namely, that mental representations of grammar-based structures provide a conceptual frame for perceiving and interpreting incoming information. Based on the present research and other related research (Schmitt, Pan, and Tavassoli 1994; Zhang and Schmitt 1998), we suggest that structural aspects of languages be incorporated into models of consumer cognition to enhance the explanatory and predictive power of these models in a cross-cultural context

A vast amount of the work developed for learning the roles of agents in a multi agent team has focused on the individual. Each agent learns within a selfish reward system. In this paper, we introduce “adaptable auctions”, a cooperative, co-evolutionary mechanism in which agents learn using a team-based reward system with the goal of obtaining the best team for achieving a task in an environment that requires coordination to succeed. The agents use a simple auction mechanism to negotiate their roles dynamically. Each agent bids individually according to their perceptions. The system then chooses the best combination of bids for the team; the chosen bids may not be optimal for each individual, but the system learns to bid as a team and develops the best team-based strategy. Our test-bed is based on the RoboCup Four-Legged Soccer League, and we develop our learning algorithm in a simple, simulated version of this environment.

Three studies tested the idea that when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups. Participants ' group memberships were made salient and the collective support apparently enjoyed by the in-group was measured or manipulated. The authors then measured anger and fear (Studies 1 and 2) and anger and contempt (Study 3), as well as the desire to move against or away from the out-group. Intergroup anger was distinct from intergroup fear, and the inclination to act against the out-group was distinct from the tendency to move away from it. Participants who perceived the in-group as strong were more likely to experience anger toward the out-group and to desire to take action against it. The effects of perceived in-group strength on offensive action tendencies were mediated by anger. The annals of history and contemporary news sources bear overwhelming witness to the variety of ways in which out-groups are devalued, discriminated against, and sometimes decimated by the members of other groups. One group is shunned and avoided, a second economically exploited, another belittled and scapegoated, and yet another systematically murdered. In contributing a social psychological perspective to the understanding of negative intergroup behavior, social psychologists have typically focused on prejudice---a negative evaluation of a group and its members-as the cause of discrimination. Despite the insights provided by such an approach (for reviews, see Brewer & Brown, 1998;

The increased diffusion of the Internet has made computer-mediated communication (CMC) very popular. However, a difficult question arises for psychologists and communication researchers: “What are the communicative characteristics of CMC?” According to the “cues-filtered-out” approach, CMC lacks the specifically relational features (social cues), which enable the interlocutors to identify correctly the kind of interpersonal situations they find themselves in. This paper counters this vision by integrating in its theoretical frame the different psycho-social approaches available in current literature. In particular, the paper describes the characteristics of the socio-cognitive processes—emotional expression, context definition, and identity creation—used by the interlocutors to make order and create relationships out of the miscommunication processes typical of CMC. Moreover, it presents the emerging forms of CMC—instant messaging, shared hypermedia, weblogs, and graphical chats—and their possible social and communicative effects.