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Article of Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2008

Group awareness and self-presentation in computer-supported information exchange

Authors: Joachim Kimmerle, Ulrike Cress

Abstract: A common challenge in many situations of computer-supported collaborative learning is increasing the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other group members. As a prototypical situation of computer-supported information exchange, a shared-database setting was chosen for the current study. This information-exchange situation represented a social dilemma: while the contribution of information to a shared database induced costs and provided no benefit for the individual, the entire group suffered when all members decided to withhold information. In order to alleviate the informationexchange dilemma, a group-awareness tool was employed. It was hypothesized that participants would use group awareness for self-presentational purposes. For the examination of this assumption, the personality variable ‘protective self-presentation’ (PSP) was measured. An interaction effect of group awareness and PSP was found: when an awareness tool provided information concerning the contribution behavior of each individual, this tool was used as a self-presentation opportunity. In order to understand this effect in more detail, single items of the PSP-scale were analyzed.

Keywords: Group awareness, Self-presentation, Information-exchange dilemma

Citation: Kimmerle, J. & Cress, U. (2008) Group awareness and self-presentation in computer-supported information exchange. ijcscl 3 (1)

DOI: 10.1007/s11412-007-9027-z

Preprint: kimmerle_cress_3_1.pdf

About this article at link.springer.com [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11412-007-9027-z] including a link to the official electronic version.