Lindsay Oishi (loishi AT stanford DOT edu) (primary author of this writeup)
Michael Wheet (wheeties AT gmail DOT com)
Greg Schwartz (greg AT gregschwartz DOT net)
This is a writeup for CS377P: Peace Innovation at Stanford University.
Purpose:
To encourage peace by increasing feelings of intimacy and community among friends.
What we did:
We made a Facebook application, called “Expose Yourself,” that allowed Facebook users to post and receive self-disclosing messages on their profile pages.
What we measured & how:
We used a pre-test/post-test design in which we asked one question: “Imagine you are throwing a party. Who would you invite?” The two dependent variables were:
- the identity of people invited
- the number of people invited
The hypothesis was that self-disclosure creates a greater feeling of intimacy and community among friends, and that this would lead to two outcomes:
- People to whom a participant sent self-disclosure messages would be more likely to be on that participant’s post-test invitation list
- Participating in self-disclosure activities would enhance feelings of friendship and lead to a higher number of people invited at post-test.
What worked:
- 61 people used our application, and 18 completed the pre-test and post-test.
- There is some evidence that adding the application made it more likely that the person who sent you the application would consider you as someone they would invite to a party. In other words, the application could have reinforced some friendships. (33 out of 237 new people who were listed on post-test were people who added the app).
- Of the 18 people who completed both pre-test and post-test, 8 showed increase in number of friends listed, 6 stayed the same, and 4 showed a decrease. This lends some support to our hypothesis that the exercise of self-disclosure and hearing the self-disclosure of friends increases feelings of friendship and community (which we believe is a predictor of peace).
- On the post-test, 70% of the 16 respondents said that they enjoyed the trial. The remainder simply didn’t answer the question (no one said they did not enjoy it).
What didn’t work:
- Public nature of the application meant that responses were influenced not only by individual interaction but by group trends as well. For example, early themes of posts may have influenced later posts.
- Getting people to participate required a lot of persuasion.
- There was a great deal of attrition.
What others can learn from our work:
- There were many design decisions that we made that affected our results (such as the type and size of response box, and the restriction of possible invitees to Facebook friends). These should be carefully considered for whether they will affect results meaningfully, or not.
- For people to participate, the technology and procedure has to work flawlessly. Many people did not participate because they had difficulties with the technology or because they thought the instructions were confusing.