Investigating the Impact of 'Emphasis Frames' and Social Loafing on Player Motivation and Performance in a Crowdsourcing Game

With an increasing reliance on crowdsourcing games as data-gathering tools, it is imperative to understand how to motivate and sustain high levels of voluntary contribution. To this end, the present work directly compared the impact of various "emphasis frames," highlighting distinct intrinsic motivational factors, used to describe an online game in which players provide descriptive metadata "tags" for digitized images. An initial study showed that, compared to frames emphasizing personal enjoyment or altruistic motivations, a frame emphasizing a "growing community of players" solicited significantly fewer contributions. A second study tested the hypothesis that this lower level of contribution resulted from social loafing (the tendency to exert less effort in collective tasks in which contributions are anonymous and pooled). Results revealed that, compared to a no-frame control condition, a frame emphasizing the preponderance of other players reduced contribution levels and game replay likelihood, whereas a frame emphasizing the scarcity of fellow players increased contribution and replay levels. Various strategies for counteracting social loafing in crowdsourcing contexts are discussed.

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