Bowling together again: Facilitating the initiation of collective action through awareness of others

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2019

Abstract

Often within communities there is sufficient interest in group-activities and yet they fail to occur because of insufficient individual initiative. This could be due to diffusion of responsibility or uncertainty about the availability of potential participants. Providing information about the number of interested individuals has conflicting implications, and hence an ambiguous impact on the likelihood of activities occurring. Our experiment examines the impact of providing information about community interest on activity initiation. Subjects (n=2000) were given information about the level of interest in a possible activity within their community and the ability to initiate its planning. Results indicate that displaying sufficient interest in an activity is positively associated with willingness to initiate planning. This suggests that Internet applications which 1) provide awareness of shared activity interest and 2) reduce effort required to initiate activity planning could boost collective action and improve community life.

Identifier

85108283383 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9780998133126]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

ISSN

15301605

First Page

197

Last Page

205

Volume

2019-January

Grant

1422696

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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