Subtle visual cues in online forums nudge users to reveal more than they would like

“In a marginalized — or stigmatized — group, it’s often hard to get people to talk or to reveal personal information. However, we found that once the users got the sense that they were in the same boat as others, or that they were connected to others in the same network, they were more willing to disclose their private information and revisit the forum,” said Andrew Gambino, doctoral student, mass communication, Penn State. “What we’ve found is a very basic design solution to increase participation in this group. This might be a way for small groups, particularly ones that deal with stigmatized or marginalized topics, to survive.”

The cues of both the crowd and connectivity icons may be stronger for people who have a desire to be part of an effort to build a community, according to the researchers. For instance, users of the site who indicated they were willing to share information to build a community were also more likely to disclose more highly sensitive information when they saw the crowd and connectivity icons.

A website with pictures that suggested a sense of community — for example, group pictures, or people holding hands — did not significantly affect the user’s sense of community or disclosure behavior.

“Sense of community may be a relatively stable attribute of forum participants, which would make it difficult to influence with a short-term intervention,” said Mary Beth Rosson, professor and associate dean of information sciences and technology, and a collaborator on the project.

The researchers recruited 218 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online task platform. The volunteers were randomly assigned to one of six different websites that were designed to reflect a site with a crowd cue or one without the crowd cue, a site with a connectivity cue or no connectivity cue, or a site that reflected the community framing or no framing.

Participants were asked to join a site described as “an online community open to anyone interested in exploring their sexuality and learning about sexual health and well-being.” The participants were then asked to share information about their sexual behaviors and health. They were also told that information would be used to connect them to similar people in the community.

Participants were given the option to not disclose information in every question, as well as the option to leave the website at any time.

“Offering many small opportunities to disclose or not disclose was intended to approximate the ubiquitous requests for sharing that users get from web and smartphone apps in their everyday lives,” said Rosson.

In the future, the researchers may see if these cues influence disclosure on other types of online media, such as social media sites.

“We may see similar effects in social media, for example,” said Gambino. “If anything, we intentionally chose a very difficult subject, a difficult context, and found people sharing more information due to these simple cues and mindsets.”