Real Time Social Network Feedback Experiment

I think this would be something valuable to follow. I keep checking back and there are lots of things related to what we talk about in class, and more!

Main Blog: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/

Blog post link: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/small_group_networks/

This is an interesting Here's a blog post by David Lazer, the director of the blog, regarding a real time social network experiment that was conducted:

October 17, 2007
Real Time Social Network Feedback Experiment

My colleagues and I at the Media Lab recently completed an experiment where we used our sociometric badges to allow people to see how their social network changed over the course of an intensive two week international college student workshop in Japan. The 45 students were placed into teams of 6-8 after the second day of the workshop, where they learned about leadership and recent advances in manufacturing processes and environmental policy. Over the last few days of the workshop the groups competed on a creative engineering task that was judged by area experts. The students wore the badges all day every day for the entire workshop, giving us an unprecedented amount of compete data.

Over the course of the day we would collect data from the badges by transmitting data wirelessly to basestations, and at the end of the day we would download the data from these basestations for processing. Within ten minutes we printed out individual and group feedback sheets for all participants, who then had a reflection session on the feedback and their activies during the day. This feedback consisted not only of a social network diagram for the course of the workshop up to that point, but also of an analysis of the group dynamics patterns that the badges of observed. In our visualizations we showed how much each individual in the group spoke, who spoke after who, and how interactive (vs. lecture-style) each group member was.

There were many interesting things that we learned from this data. Predictably, at first the Japanese students spoke much less than the students from the US, since the workshop was conducted in English. In addition, most of the American students tended to exhibit "cliquish" behavior: American students would only talk with each other. After the first few days, however, these communication problems were solved, and according to qualititative data the feedback was very helpful on this front. At first the assigned group leaders also tended to monopolize conversations, and this was evident in the feedback. They quickly recognized this, however, and soon were engaging other members in meetings and conversations.

The social network diagrams that we provided were also enlightening. Predictably, before the groups formed communication was sparse with few clusters, but once people were placed into groups the intra-group communication amount rose dramatically, although some groups still exhibited sparse communication patterns. Participants and organizers felt this aspect of the feedback to be the most helpful, because it let each group situate itself in the context of the entire workshop and think about how they could cooperate with other group members and other groups more.

Of course, while this is not a formal experiment, the fact that we were able to generate this feedback in real time significantly drove up participation. While participation in the study was a requirement for participation in the workshop, we observed that people were much happier to wear the badges since they could see the effect so quickly. We think that incorporating this type of feedback into studies of this nature is important since it shows the participants that we really are collecting useful data. While it may have changed their behavior, without useful feedback or functionality it seems impractical to expect individuals to religiously wear a sensing devices for weeks or months all the time. We are currently conducting lab experiments to test how effective these feedback mechanisms are at changing group behavior, and we are planning more field experiments to see if we can actually change organizational structure as well.


I just wish I could've seen those social network diagrams!