CAREER: Advancing Social Computing with Tailored Motivators

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This project will enable the development of personally-tailored motivators for the use of social technologies, e.g., various incentives to encourage users to contribute knowledge, provide emotional support or curate information on an online system. The project includes (1) study of motivator-to-motivation matching using a series of controlled studies, (2) development of models to infer users' motivation profiles through analyzing how underlying motivations predict usages of social technologies, and (3) application and evaluation of tailored motivators to encourage user-participation in naturalistic settings. The results of this research will advance scientific understanding of how a person's motivations influence his or her usage of social technologies. It will also deepen our understanding of human motivations more generally by elucidating the intricate relationship between the types of rewards and how they are moderated by different underlying motivations to affect behaviors. In addition, the research will also result in models for identifying users' motivation profiles, and a general design framework for researchers and designers to tailor motivators, bridging multiple disciplines.The developed motivation profiles and design framework may be useful to tackle a variety of everyday challenges of motivation in social technologies to improve knowledge sharing, social support and information representation. Through collaborative projects, this research will also aid health behavior change efforts to encourage blood donation and combat infant obesity. Finally, through an integrated educational plan, this research program will also contribute to improving general classroom learning, the creation of a graduate course and high school summer camp, and the training of scholars in interdisciplinary research methods.