Undo unto others….Twitter’s imperfect study of reciprocity and (un)requited love

Every once in awhile pop culture gives psychologists a gift.

Survivor, for instance, was a gift. The Apprentice, Parking Wars and now Smile, you’re under arrest… also gifts. In fact, the entire genre of reality shows is s a window for observing influence strategies and obedience-to-authority in a semi-controlled setting.  Authority. Social Proof. Ingroup-outgroup distinctions.  Reciprocity. They are all there for the watching.

And now we have a new gift: Twitter (www.twitter.com). Twitter is the emerging social network starlette, a microblogging tool. Its a bit like Facebook: You sign up to follow people you like and/or who share your interests and you exchange information. Except that on Twitter, that information is limited to (hopefully) profound and pithy statements of 140 characters or less. Think of it as exchanging headlines or pointers.

Twitter is a rich space to study reciprocity. Reciprocity is basically our drive to return favors. Reciprocity is why, when someone makes you dinner, you feel obliged to make them dinner back.  And why when someone follows you in Twitter, you feel a little guilty if you don’t follow back. At least the first few hundred times.

Osen Komura Twitter Stats

For psychologists,  Twitter could be a space to answer questions that we can’t necessarily ask in a university research lab. Internal Research Review Boards are reasonably twitchy about internet research and privacy, after all. The scale and reach of Twitter is big, too.  And, at its essence,  Twitter is reciprocity in its most kneejerk form.

Social psychologists should take note: Armchair psychologists are already running quasi-studies ….

For instance, Stefan Tanse, a student in Romania, created the Twitter account Osen Komura  (www.twitter.com/osen) to explore whether people automatically “followback” strangers who follow them. He posted a few benign messages, signed up to follow 40,ooo other people and watched what happened. When he quit watching sometime in April 08, 12% of the people that he followed had signed up to follow him back. That’s a pretty good rate for a feed with no real content. And his following rate is still growing. Today (30Dec08) his followback rate is 24%. For sure, this exercise is well known. Myriads of bloggers have highlighted the “Who is Osen Komura and why is he following me?” phenomena.   But if people read the blogs, they’d know  … oh never mind.

Nantela (a biologist from Montreal) expanded the experiment in two ways.  First, he wanted to see if people really do just click “follow” reflexively or if they actually look at the persons feed before they decide to follow it?  To find out, he created Ru4real and repeat posted a single message to Twitter: “DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is an experiment to see how many people read the pages of the people they follow. You are a tool.” And signed up to follow 6,ooo people. The blind followback rate was about 10%.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Nantela also wanted to see if reciprocity applies for negative events, too. That is, if I unfollow you, will you unfollow me? (Maybe we call this revenge?)  So he unfollowed everybody he had been following. If reciprocity applies for negative events, then we  expect  the people that Nantala unfollowed will  unfollow him, too.

Nantela’s observations suggest that we do also reflexively return for “negative favors”. Unfollowing happens. Ru4real lost two followers just yesterday.  Nantela’s “results” suggest that retaliation for unfollowing happens at a slower and lower rate than for following. Be careful, though. That’s likey just an artifact  of how Twitter works. Today,  Twitter’s default alerts you when someone signs up to follow you. But it doesn’t do that that when someone UNfollows you. So, while there is an clear and explict “follow” event to respond to, there is no such “unfollow” event to reciprocate. So Twitter needs to change a little before we can learn whether for if revenge is as reflexive as it is sweet.  Note: Some Twitterers opt, through add-on programs, to be notified when someone unfollows. I suspect those people are reflected in the  droppoff cliff in the followers graph above.

Maybe Twitter will change. I hope it does, actually. Running this “experiment” for real could extend and refine our understanding of reciprocity and and interpersonal behaviors within both Twitter and within the social networking universe.

UsabilityMethods: For cardsorting, 20 is enough.

Q: How many participants do we need for our cardsort?

Tullis and Woods conducted a real data simulation study to determine the practically optimal number of participants need for cardsorting.

First they collected data from a large set of users–168 people to be exact. Then they ran cardsort “studies” of different sizes by randomly drawing data for individual participants from the larger data set. Since it was all mathematical–based on similarity scores within data pairs and sets– it was easy (sort of) to “run the studies” enough times to understand the average variation that occurrs in the groups of different sizes.
Based on their simulations, Tullis & Woods concluded cardsorting studies with just 20-30 participants are robust and predictive.

Tullis, T., and Wood, L. (2004), “How Many Users Are Enough for a Card-Sorting Study?” Proceedings UPA’2004 (Minneapolis, MN, June 7-11, 2004).

Rejection is cold. Literally.

Cold and lonely. These two concepts seemed permanently paired in the English language. So do warm and fuzzy.  And new studies suggests that the linguistic link between emotional experience and physical sensation might not be so accidental. University of Toronto researchers Zhong and Lonardelli found that study participants describing a personal experience of social rejection or exclusion actually felt colder than others who remembered inclusive experiences. People describing negative experiences estimated the room temperature to be about 2.5 degrees C colder (That’s about 4.5 degrees difference in Farenheit.).  Feelings, it seems, can influence our physical experience.
It seems the reverse holds true as well: Your physical world influences your attitudes and largesse toward others. To demonstrate this, researchers Williams and Bargh  asked Yale University students to hold a cup of coffee for them—as a favor—during an elevator ride to the  study location. Students who were asked to hold hot coffee subsequently described a third person as having a much warmer personality than those asked to hold iced coffee. Similarly, in a subsequent study, participants asked to test and rate a warm therapeutic pad demonstrated greater generosity than those who rated a cold one.
So the next time you want to make a good impression on someone, you may not need to buy them a cup of hot coffee. Instead you just ask them to hold yours ….

References
Zhong, C. and Leonardelli, G, J. (2008). Cold and Lonely. Does social exclusion litteraly feel cold? Psychological Science 19(9).
Williams, L.E. and Bargh, J. A. (2008).Experiencing  Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth. Science 24(322) pp. 606 – 607.