HCC-Small: Deception Hotspots as a Resource for Supporting Interpersonal Awareness Narratives

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study of the function of deception in electronic communications is designed to develop new theories and tools that will significantly improve collaboration in virtual organizations of all types. Virtual organizations - aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries - are having transformative effects on the ways in which people socialize and collaborate. They enable interaction between individuals with diverse perspectives who might not otherwise work together, the sharing of expensive and scarce resources, and novel ways of accomplishing tasks and solving problems. Despite the unique capabilities that virtual organizations provide to distributed groups, many have faced difficulties in working together at a distance. While virtual organizations provide basic communication tools (e.g., instant messaging or video conferencing), these tools lack support for the subtlety and nuance of initiating and exiting conversations. In particular, systems fail to support the narrative accounts that people use to explain their behavior and availability. The result of this disconnect between social practice and technical implementation is a flood of unwanted interruptions and painstaking decisions about what personal information one is willing to share and with whom. This research addresses this fundamental problem by developing a narrative approach to interpersonal awareness, and by focusing on the role of deception in managing these narratives. Preliminary evidence suggests that one fifth of all lies told in instant messaging are used to initiate or conclude a conversation. These lies represent potentially valuable "hotspots" that signal trouble in one's interpersonal awareness narrative. Focusing on these hotspots, this work addresses 3 issues: 1) How do people use deception to manage their interactions and avoid unwanted interruption? 3) Are there linguistic and sensor-based attributes that indicate deception may be likely? 3) Can this knowledge be used to design and evaluate tools for managing interpersonal awareness narratives and enabling interaction in virtual organizations? This work builds on substantial research in the area of interpersonal awareness and fostering informal interaction in geographically distributed groups. It makes several unique contributions through a focus on interpersonal awareness narratives: 1) systematically examining the conditions under which deception is used as a resource with existing awareness technologies, 2) conceptualizing deceptions as an indicator of a "hot spot" that can be drawn on in supporting interpersonal awareness, 3) identifying behavioral predictors of deception to design systems that reduce unwanted interruptions without blocking those that are useful or important. By managing attentional and awareness needs more fluidly, members of virtual organizations will be able to coordinate their activity and achieve their tasks more effectively, and the organizations as a whole will be better able to meet their business, educational, social or other goals.