[p2p-research] a challenge to social media enthusiasm .. what say you, league of noble peers

Tue Jul 21 09:29:48 CEST 2009

First, I glanced at the study.  Their small sample size and use of
self-selection severely limits the findings.  To top it all off, New
Scientist writes a sensationalist summary article to gather more clicks, as
they so often do.  I'd bet they hardly read the study at all.  They paid
little attention to differences in gender, which are significantly different
for many of the traits.

But then, I actually read the study.  New Scientist seems to have missed
contradictions in the data and the abstract.  The abstract does not match
the table of data provided, and the paper has an error in the Results where
it begins to talk about openness but then finishes the sentence about
agreeableness.  The data doesn't match the abstract's claims that "variance
analysis revealed significant differences between Wikipedia members and
non-Wikipedia members in agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness,
which were lower for the Wikipedia members."  Just look at the table
provided.  Agreeableness?  Yes.  The other two?  No.

First, openness.  When reading the article and abstract, I was surprised
Wikipedians scored lower on openness than non-Wikipedians, but it turns out
they didn't.  According to the data in the table, for both genders,
Wikipedians scored higher on openness than non-Wikipedians.  Out of all the
traits, it's ONLY agreeableness that's lower for Wikipedians of both
genders.

Second, conscientiousness.  While Wikipedian males scored lower on
conscientiousness than non-Wikipedian males, Wikipedian females scored
HIGHER than non-Wikipedian females.

Also, btw, somewhat of a surprise to me: while there's a big difference for
females, there's no sigificant difference in extroversion between male
Wikipedians and male non-Wikipedians.  Granted, the sample size for the
females is so small we should have little confidence in it, either.

I'm also surprised at the paper's "Conclusions" discussion, which seem very
confused in their framing of motivation, particularly discussing "altruism,"
which to me is a big red flag.  However, considering the paper doesn't get
its own data right, I'm not going to bother discussing the conclusions.

Ryan, I think you need a relaxing vacation, at the very least, if you find
yourself writing rants like the one below.  I'm completely flabbergasted by
you constructing and condemning a nebulous "them" which somehow includes the
majority of OSS organizations, Wikipedians, and Richard Stallman. Then, in
your righteous indignation, you call them judgmental.  Unbelievable, and
that's without even bringing up the latter half of the rant.

-- Stan

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 5:11 AM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Michel,
>
> What you include below doesn't surprise me at all; in fact, I've
> experienced it first hand several times.  By the way, I think it is equally
> true of open source ventures where I have noted an extreme capacity for
> organizations to harbor the socially mal-adept, cynical, crypto-elitist and
> otherwise self-serving ego-driven types as an overwhelming majority.  As we
> both have some first hand experience and since it is a obvious target, it is
> easy to visualize a personality profile of, say, Richard Stallman.  One
> finds numerous deontologists, etc. in these domains and if these folks
> entered paradise they'd complain about the rules.  In short, judgmental
> people are drawn to organized commons.  They are contentious, combative,
> highly self-certain and almost always judgmental.
>
> It doesn't take a PhD in psychology to realize that many of these people
> are expressing power and control in areas where they can do so because they
> are maladjusted to conventional social frameworks.  But it does open the
> question as to why altruism and selflessness do often occur--and when and
> where.
>
> While I have no data to match this Israeli study, my own experience is that
> those most committed to public good simply act on it and don't spend so much
> time debating their role, how others should act, or what the governance
> model is.  They aren't flamboyant about their service.  They simply just do
> it.  They are pragmatists.  These are likened to "the spiritual" in
> faith-based terms.  And then there is what I can only identify in my own
> views as the religious.  They are all about the structure, their position,
> the judgment, what is a crisis and what is the solution...and not so much
> about the actual doing of something.
>
> Ryan Lanham
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> from nicholas carr,
>>
>>
>> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/06/the_sour_wikipe.php
>>
>> The sour Wikipedian June 27, 2009
>>
>> Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social
>> production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character
>> traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research
>> psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70
>> non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16349-psychologist-finds-wikipedians-grumpy-and-closedminded.html>,
>> Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new
>> ideas."
>>
>> In their report<http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/cpb.2007.0225>on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as
>> social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net
>> than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures of "agreeableness
>> and openness." Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public
>> perceptions, the researchers suggest that "the prosocial behavior apparent
>> in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives ... which are not
>> associated with high levels of agreeableness."
>>
>> The researchers also looked at gender differences among Wikipedians. They
>> found that the women who contribute to the online encyclopedia exhibit
>> unusually high levels of introversion. Women in particular, they suggest,
>> "seem to use the Internet as a compensative tool" that allows them to
>> "express themselves" in a way "they find difficult in the offline world."
>>
>> The study is consistent with other research into the motivations
>> underlying online social production. Last year, researchers at HP Labs
>> undertook an extensive study <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.3030v1> of why
>> people upload videos to YouTube. They found that contributors are primarily
>> driven by a craving for attention. If the videos they upload aren't clicked
>> on, they tend to quickly exit the "community." YouTubers view their
>> contributions not as pieces of "a digital commons" but as "private goods"
>> that are "paid for by attention."
>>
>> Scott Caplan, a communications professor at the University of Delaware,
>> tells New Scientist that studies of social networks generally indicate that
>> "people who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of
>> social anxiety and lower social skills."
>>
>> None of this is particularly surprising. But the findings do lend a darker
>> tint to the rose-colored rhetoric that surrounds online communities. A wag
>> might suggest that "social production" would be more accurately termed
>> "antisocial production."
>>
>>
>> --
>> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
>> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
>> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>>
>> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>>
>> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
>> http://www.shiftn.com/
>>
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