August 20th, 2007
Psychology of Social Design Talk
by Joshua Porter | 
19 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/665
Last wednesday I gave a 45 minute talk at UXWeek 2007 (photos) called The Psychology of Social Design. Here are the slides:
Download PDF of The Psychology of Social Design
I’ve also created a set of resources and links for the talk at Del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/bokardo/uxweek/
My focus in the talk was to expose several psychological frameworks that can be applied to social design. The first one is Kurt Lewin’s famous equation: B=ƒ(P,E) which articulates the primary tension in social psychology: that both an individual’s personality (P) and their environment (E) affect their behavior (B)…btw: that was the only equation I’ve ever shown in a talk and will probably be the last.
Here’s an high-level outline:
- Kurt Lewin’s Equation as the central tension in social psychology
- Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as a precursor to the Del.icio.us Lesson
- Peter Kollock’s 4 motivations for contributing
- Robert Axelrod’s 3 necessary conditions to cooperate
- Duncan Watts’ study on social influence in interfaces
On the Web, of course, our environment is largely the interface we’re using in addition to the social actions that are occurring elsewhere. In many cases the interface is the only evidence we have that anything is happening at all.
The talk went well, I think. I got some really positive feedback about it from attendees, and some great questions afterward that took the discussion further.
I know that it’s not easy to follow a talk by just looking at the slide-deck, but if you have any feedback or comments, I would love to hear them.
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Comments
1. Ian Wilker 3:09pm, Mon 20th, 2007
Josh – thanks for posting this! It’s true, I wish (as always) that slideshare presentations included audio, but it’s a pretty clear deck nonetheless. You can’t know how timely it is for me, as a thought-starter for a team I’m working with.
2. Bud Caddell 5:42pm, Mon 20th, 2007
Fantastic presentation — thanks for sharing.
Over at my blog, I’m trying to start a conversation about measuring particpation inequalities in social networks — you know, the ol’ 90-9-1 problem. I’d value your feedback!
3. rashmi 12:46am, Tue 21st, 2007
Ian, SLideshare presentations can include audio now. Check out Slidecasting.
Josh – nice slides. Waiting for talk!
4. subwoofer 4:35am, Tue 21st, 2007
a`┴УZ╡+н}! that is it?
5. Kirty Jonson 5:25am, Tue 21st, 2007
Nice presentation with many conclusions. But why is it so short. There are many other Psychologist whose works can be used in social design
6. Josh 9:10am, Tue 21st, 2007
You’re right, Kirty. There are many more psychologists I could have included. However, my talk was only 45 minutes long, so I had to choose only a few and talk about them for 10 minutes or so.
7. Todd 1:37pm, Tue 21st, 2007
Kirty, Josh did an excellent job of covering what he could during the 45 minute allotment of time. His presentation was a nicely paced overview. While some is lost by not having the audio, you can put most of it together between the slides and the del.icio.us bookmarks.
Thanks for putting the slides up, Josh. I’ll be happy to have them to complement my notes and jog my memory.
8. Stephen Collins 3:37am, Wed 22nd, 2007
I really enjoyed this, Joshua. Would love to hear your audio.
Based on this, you’ll probably want to read and talk to a couple of colleagues of mine, Matthew Hodgson and Andrew Boyd.
9. matt gregg 9:24am, Wed 22nd, 2007
Really enjoyed the presentation at UX week Josh and the ongoing blog. One thought that popped into my mind in regards to Watt’s experiment was the potential to manipulate results or outcomes in an early popularity race. Do you know if anyone has tried to reliably been able to create their own desired outcomes? Seems like this could be used very improperly if so.
10. Gustavo Gawry 1:42pm, Thu 23rd, 2007
Great presentation!
Just an observation:
I know that Kurt Lewin is often recognized as the “founder of social psychology”, I don’t know if you are familiar with Wilhelm Wundt. He is generally acknowledged as a founder of experimental psychology and cognitive psychology, he is less commonly recognized as a founding figure of social psychology, but he started to talk about social psychology in 1900. As you can see it was before Kurt but very close, probably the zeitgeist was propitious to the concept of social psychology.
ps: Sorry for my bad english.
11. Josh 2:39pm, Mon 27th, 2007
Thanks, Gustavo, for pointing me to Wundt. I had heard of him, but will take a closer look now.
12. Emil 4:25pm, Sat 20th, 2007
Really impressive presentation. Hoping for audio to go along with it to get all the details of the talk! Is there a chance to get a podcast or slidecast of this Joshua?
13. Lucy 9:05am, Fri 16th, 2007
Thanks for the slideshow, gonna give that another look before I comment on that.
In the mean time could I put a strange request – that you list the links you put on delicious direct onto your post. Access to their servers usually times out, when it does work it presents badly. Its a shame, from being biggest evangelist I’ve given up using it.