Pacenotes: Uncertainty Reduction Theory and Designing Hybrid Communities

In the last Pacenotes we dug into the literature around how to design for belongingness in online communities. I thought we would follow the lit trail from the Civic Signals research and go a hop or two further upstream into the work that led to those conclusions in the first place. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory

Uncertainty reduction theory (Wikipedia)was introduced in 1975 by Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese of Northwestern University.

The authors developed the theory in response to the prevailing norms of the time in researching interpersonal communications. Scholars tended to rely on social-psychological frameworks to explain how and why people interacted. Berger and Calabrese wanted to take a different approach: to closely examine the behaviours and responses that took place during actual communications, and to come up with a framework that could be applied across a broad set of communications.

The theory Berger and Calabrese came up with involves splitting up initial interactions into three phases:

Entry The initial meeting between strangers; Berger and Calabrese find that during this phase information-seeking between both parties tends to be symmetric.

Personal Several minutes after entry, participants enter a personal phase. This phase tends to appear after repeated interactions in the entry phase between the individuals. Participants depart from social norms somewhat during this phase and discuss desirable social or personal values and traits, for example.

Exit This phase marks evaluating whether future interactions are desirable. Plans are made (or not made!) and discussed at this phase.

Based on this structure Berger and Calabrese produce a bewildering array of axioms and theorems, which you can check out in the original paper, but I’ll highlight a few that I think are interesting to social token communities.

THEOREM 6: Amount of communication and similarity are positively related The more similar a stranger is with another, the more communication takes place. This could be along gender lines, for instance, as the next study we’ll look at establishes.

Theorems 12, 16–18: All related to information seeking and correlations with other factors. Information seeking is one of the actions an individual will undertake to reduce uncertainty. One of the authors’ axioms states that as uncertainty decreases, so does information seeking. Therefore, smart community design can supply sufficient information to reduce uncertainy, as we will also see in the next study.

To Go or not to Go!: What Influences Newcomers of Hybrid Communities to Participate Offline

How did we get to Uncertainty Reduction Theory in the first place? We followed the lit trail from this paper, To Go or not to Go!: What Influences Newcomers of Hybrid Communities to Participate Offline by Di Lu and Rosta Farzan at the University of Pittsburgh. This paper was in turn referenced in the Civic Signals research which we covered in the last Pacenotes.

So Lu and Farzan want to investigate the following: What gets newcomers to a virtual community to attend offline events (what they call “newcomer socialisation”), and then what is the effect on that community of offline events?

The authors call virtual communities with an offline component “hybrid communities”. They use a group on Meetup.com to investigate these hybrid communities.

They make an interesting point about offline and virtual communities: Some communities exist without the online infrastructure, such as neighbourhood groups on NextDoor for example. Others can only exist because of the online infrastructure: this includes Meetup.

So what did they find? I’m going to pluck out some highlights.

A photo for the event host means more newcomers. More information leads to higher newcomer turnouts. This includes event descriptions (26% more attendance), additional instructions (21%), and putting a photo for the event host (a whopping 66% up).

Newcomers like“we” words. Using inclusive language in your descriptions leads to a rise in newcomer attendance. One unit of “we” words leads to a 15% boost in newcomer presence.

Newcomers go where others do. One extra RSVP before a newcomer’s RSVP leads to a 45% increase in likelihood of them attending as their first event. So the more attendees a newcomer sees RSVPing for an event, the more likely they are to branch out into offline events. They are also more likely to attend events with more similar members, such as by gender, as the authors found.

OG hosts drop newcomer attendance. If a host is OG, or holds an organising role in the group, newcomers are 45% less likely to attend. This is due to a concept called “social distance” which speaks to the gulf between newcomers and the host.

Sundays are the best day. ‘Nuff said. It’s the day most chosen by newcomers.

What can social token communities learn from these findings?

Supply lots of information, and the right kind of information for newcomers. As Di and Farzan find, according to Uncertainty Reduction Theory, information supply is a critical factor when strangers meet one another. Therefore, it’s a key building block in designing a token community. Di and Farzan recommend creating information specifically for newcomers to reduce their uncertainty and therefore grow event attendance and community participation. This includes specific outreach to newcomers, self-introductions in the group to help newcomers understand who’s attending, and just plenty of descriptive and informational information around the event, in general.

Balance in-groups with newcomers. Newcomers are less likely to attend events where they think it’s dominated by a core group of well-connected participants. Therefore, organisers might recommend more diverse events as a target for newcomers. You can also use lots of “we” language, and try to optimise for certain similar traits, such as gender, to promote attendance.

Reduce social distance of hosts. Newcomers may be intimidated by a gulf in social distance between themselves and event hosts. Hosts should therefore go out of their way to eliminate this distance where possible. The authors suggest direct outreach from hosts to newcomers to close this gap.

Surfacing the behaviour of others matters. The more RSVPs, the more newcomers are likely to RSVP (although the number of comments on an event page doesn’t seem to have an impact). The authors recommend visual techniques to highlight the participation of others in an event, thus signalling to newcomers that this event is popular and that they should join in.

Bonus read!

Following Lu and Farzan’s lit trail led me to this other paper, Bridging the Divide Between Virtual and Embodied Spaces: Exploring the Effect of Offline Interactions on the Sociability of Participants of Topic-Specific Online Communities, by Angelopoulos of Tilburg University and Yasmin Merali at the University of Hull. They looked at an online cigar-smoking community!

Some super quick takeaways:

• Online communities complement, not replace offline ones
• Online sociability is the concept that people interact within certain norms online.
• The three factors that influence online socability are: purpose (the thing people are passionate about), people (group members), and policies (protocols that guide interactions).
• Online-to-offline interactions lead to increased online sociability in these communities.
• Examples from the study include herfs, which are meetings to smoke cigars together; bombing, which is mailing out parcels of cigars and other products to other members; passes, which is gifting cigars on the public wishlists of other members.