Personalization Paradox in Behavior Change Apps:Lessons from a Social Comparison-Based Personalized App for Physical Activity

Social comparison-based features are widely used in social computing apps. However, most existing apps are not grounded in social comparison theories and do not consider individual differences in social comparison preferences and reactions. This paper is among the first to automatically personalize social comparison targets. In the context of an m-health app for physical activity, we use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques of multi-armed bandits. Results from our user study (n=53) indicate that there is some evidence that motivation can be increased using the AI-based personalization of social comparison. The detected effects achieved small-to-moderate effect sizes, illustrating the real-world implications of the intervention for enhancing motivation and physical activity. In addition to design implications for social comparison features in social apps, this paper identified the personalization paradox, the conflict between user modeling and adaptation, as a key design challenge of personalized applications for behavior change. Additionally, we propose research directions to mitigate this Personalization Paradox

Group Process and Organizational Environment: Student Organizations in the University

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68768/2/10.1177_089976407400300305.pd

Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motives: Standard and Behavioral Approaches to Agency and Labor Markets

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly stylized assumptions regarding human motivation, e.g., that employees seek to earn as much money as possible with minimal effort. In this essay, we explore the consequences of introducing behavioral complexity and realism into models of agency within organizations. Specifically, we assess the insights gained by allowing employees to be guided by such motivations as the desire to compare favorably to others, the aspiration to contribute to intrinsically worthwhile goals, and the inclination to reciprocate generosity or exact retribution for perceived wrongs. More provocatively, from the standpoint of standard economics, we also consider the possibility that people are driven, in ways that may be opaque even to themselves, by the desire to earn social esteem or to shape and reinforce identity

Racial Group Affinity and Religious Giving: Evidence from Congregation-Level Panel Data

Since giving to religious organizations constitutes a substantial portion of total charitable giving, an understanding of the determinants of religious giving is a vital policy concern. Drawing on a novel congregation-level panel dataset, we examine whether religious giving is driven by preferences for racial group affinity, that is, loyalty to one's own racial group. To address endogeneity concerns, we combine a fixed effects estimation framework with an instrumental variable approach. We find robust evidence consistent with the racial group affinity motive: a decrease in the percent of whites in the county is ceteris paribus associated with a decrease in the total giving receipts collected by predominantly white congregations

Deception and Self-Deception

Why are people so often overconfident? We conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis that people become overconfident to more effectively persuade or deceive others. After performing a cognitively challenging task, half of our subjects are informed that they can earn money by convincing others of their superior performance. The privately elicited beliefs of informed subjects are significantly more confident than the beliefs of subjects in the control condition. By generating exogenous variation in confidence with a noisy performance signal, we are also able to show that higher confidence indeed makes subjects more persuasive in the subsequent face-to-face interactions

Inferences about the efferent system based on a perceptual illusion produced by eye movements

Precise measurement of the position of the eye as it follows a moving target makes possible the exact computation of retinal information about the path of movement of that target. Comparing this retinal information with the reported visual perception of the path of movement enables inferences to be made concerning what information about eye position was used by the perceptual system. On the assumption that information available to the perceptual system about eye position comes only from monitoring efferent commands, these inferences are also about the content of those commands. Our data and analysis suggest that the efferent command for smooth pursuit eye movement, at the stage where it is monitored, contains good information about the direction of movement but only crude information about speed. In the last decade neurophysiologists have increasingly emphasized the importance of understanding the organization and functioning of the efferent system. The genera