Scientific American wrote an article how Stereotyping contributes to Your Success (or Failure). Basically research is showing that success on a task is not only dependent skills, but also on the believes that the person had in relation to the group he belongs to. One of the examples given is women doing math tests. If they are told in advance that women in general perform worse on math, then they indeed have worse results, compared to women who have not been told this. Women who have been told to belong to a group that is performing better on a math test, are performing even better.
While reading it, i was thinking of how this would apply to users of communities. For example are Flickr users better photographers, just because they feel part of that community. Or Dell computer users that feel that they are part of the Dell Community, better at solving computer problems they have. Or at least can you make them believe they are, so they indeed solve problems more easily.
There are a couple of strategies described in the article, that could make users better at performing tasks. The most promising in my mind is what researchers call “social creativity”. Instead of making the user feel like a group that is not good at performing the task, compare them to a group that is even worse at performing that task. They then feel to belong to the better group, and according to the research will actually perform the task better.
Currently communities are build around groups of people, but they are not used to give the user a feeling that they are better then others. Only that the others in the community can help the user. My question now is, should operators of communities (or even the members of themselves), start on comparing the members of that particular group to other groups, to give them a better feel?
Let me know what you think.
