Cultural Differences in Psychological Ownership of Social Media Content

Abstract

Global organizations increasingly encourage or require their members to participate in social media to build identity, increase cooperation and coordination, and for other purposes. These contributions are driven by the workers but may be legally or technically owned by the organization. The created content may be repurposed in the future in unexpected ways. In a series of four experiments, we examine differences in feelings of psychological ownership (sense of personal investment, etc) across cultures with respect to paid content creation, eventual use of the content, attribution or nonattribution of the worker, and length of the content. We find strong evidence for cultural differences. Results for eventual use and attribution are mixed. Work is still on going with respect to the importance of the length of the content.

Presenter Bio: Peter Kinnaird is a 3rd year PhD student in Carnegie Mellon University's Human Computer Interaction Institute within the School of Computer Science. He holds a Masters of Science in Human Computer Interaction and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on social computing, crowdsourcing, and civic participation. He is currently interning in IBM Research's Collaborative User Experience group.