Judd Antin · Yahoo
Motivation in the Age of Online Participation

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Why do people create, interact, and collaborate online? What are the deep motivations that drive so many to invest significant time and energy on Facebook, Flickr, StackExchange, Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, and countless other sites? As online participation has become one of the internet's driving forces, questions about motivation and incentives have come to the forefront. Motivation, however, is hard to talk about and harder to measure. This talk discusses some of the problems with current models of motivation that are enshrined in trends like "gamification." It also examines some key problems with measuring motivation through surveys, and presents a recent study on social desirability effects in reports of motivation on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Finally, the talk will conclude with some thoughts on the future of measuring motivation and developing effective incentive systems for motivating online participation.

Judd Antin is a social psychologist and Post-Doctoral Research Scientist in the Internet Experiences group at Yahoo! Research. Judd's areas of expertise include incentives and motivation for online collaboration, online communities, collective action and social dilemmas, as well as trust, reliability, and credibility. His research interests center on user-generated content, social media, the wisdom of crowds, distributed work, and all other forms of online collaboration. Judd completed his Ph.D. in Information Management & Systems at the School of Information at UC Berkeley in 2010. In 2011 Judd was named one of MIT Technology Review's top 35 innovators under 35 (TR35).