This document summarizes a study exploring the cognitive consequences of social search. The study investigated how people use social resources like friends and social networks during search tasks. It found that combining multiple social search tactics like searching, targeted asking, and network asking led to better task performance than using tactics alone. The number of facts found and how deeply users processed information correlated with using multiple tactics. The study also found that people did more cognitive processing when composing questions for their network than when receiving information.
Scaling API-first ā The story of a global engineering organization
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SOCIAL SEARCH STRATEGIES
1. EXPLORING THE COGNITIVE
CONSEQUENCES OF SOCIAL SEARCH
UC San Diego Brynn M. Evans
PARC Sanjay Kairam
PARC Peter Pirolli
CHI ā09 April 9, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
2. Research Goal
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
As a study of social search, we are particularly interested in HOW people make use of social
resources during search tasks.
3. Motivation
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
This is important because Google sometimes fails us.
In fact, exploratory queries are dificult to answer with traditional search alone (there were
several sessions at CHI that have looked at this issue).
4. Motivation
Photo Credit: David Wild
MORRIS 2008; EVANS CHI 2008
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Yet prior work has shown that people do ask friends for help during search.
Social interactions are actually quite common during search (between half and two-thirds of
searches may involve social interactions).
5. Motivation
HATCH GARDNER 1993; KARASAVVIDIS 2002
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Additionally, social interactions play an important cognitive role in problem solving,
brainstorming, and learning tasks. People help each other think through problems and
reframe issues.
This has been documented in classrooms, organizations, libraries, and other physical
environments.
6. Study design
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
To study the beneļ¬t of social interactions in search, we recruited 8 subjects who were expert
searchers, highly social.
They performed 2 Google-hard search tasks in two seach conditions. We video recorded all
interactions and asked them to talk-aloud while they were searching.
7. Study design: tasks
55 MPH PYROLYTIC OIL
āIf we lowered the speed āWhat role does pyrolytic oil
limit nationally to 55 mph, (or pyrolysis) play in the
how many fewer barrels of debate over carbon
oil would the U.S. consume emissions?ā
every year?ā
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
These were our task questions.
8. Study design: conditions
NON-SOCIAL CONDITION
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Subjects received each task in one of two conditions.
In the non-social condition, they performed an otherwise typical web search...
9. Study design: conditions
SOCIAL CONDITION
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
In the Social Condition, they were restricted to social resources only: friends, social networks,
blogs, question-answer sites...
10. Three primar y social strategies
TARGETED ASKING
NETWORK ASKING
SEARCHING
Photo Credit: Timothy Morgan
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Our analysis is restricted to the social condition right now, since we are primarily interested
in HOW people exploit their social enviroments.
We found that people used one of three primary social tactics to answer our task problems
11. Task performance
SS03
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
You can *quot;see these strategies reļ¬ected in the color coding of behaviors on one subjectās
timeline.+quot;
This person begins by searching over MetaFilter; then posts questions on MetaFilter
Twitter; #!quot;
and ļ¬nally IMs with a friend to get additional help.
But as you can also see, these activities are interspersed with many other behaviors (as
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12. Task performance
SEARCHING
SEARCHING
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
You can *quot;see these strategies reļ¬ected in the color coding of behaviors on one subjectās
timeline.+quot;
This person begins by searching over MetaFilter; then posts questions on MetaFilter
Twitter; #!quot;
and ļ¬nally IMs with a friend to get additional help.
But as you can also see, these activities are interspersed with many other behaviors (as
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expected) -- such as the gray bars: thinking/synthesizing the information heās come across
#$quot;
13. Task performance
NETWORK ASKING
NETWORK ASKING
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
You can *quot;see these strategies reļ¬ected in the color coding of behaviors on one subjectās
timeline.+quot;
This person begins by searching over MetaFilter; then posts questions on MetaFilter
Twitter; #!quot;
and ļ¬nally IMs with a friend to get additional help.
But as you can also see, these activities are interspersed with many other behaviors (as
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expected) -- such as the gray bars: thinking/synthesizing the information heās come across
#$quot;
14. Task performance
TARGETED ASKING
TARGETED ASKING
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Photo Credit: Timothy Morgan
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
You can *quot;see these strategies reļ¬ected in the color coding of behaviors on one subjectās
timeline.+quot;
This person begins by searching over MetaFilter; then posts questions on MetaFilter
Twitter; #!quot;
and ļ¬nally IMs with a friend to get additional help.
But as you can also see, these activities are interspersed with many other behaviors (as
##quot;
expected) -- such as the gray bars: thinking/synthesizing the information heās come across
#$quot;
15. Task performance
SS03
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OTHER THINKING
RESPONSES?
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Photo Credit: Timothy Morgan
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
You can *quot;see these strategies reļ¬ected in the color coding of behaviors on one subjectās
timeline.+quot;
This person begins by searching over MetaFilter; then posts questions on MetaFilter
Twitter; #!quot;
and ļ¬nally IMs with a friend to get additional help.
But as you can also see, these activities are interspersed with many other behaviors (as
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expected) -- such as the gray bars: thinking/synthesizing the information heās come across
#$quot;
16. Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Of course, subjects were highly diverse in the strategies they employed, as can be seen by
the various color coding patterns in their search episodes. This shows patterns for all 8
subjects (in the social condition).
Some didnāt have an expert friend on hand -- (they didnāt have the ālifelineā to call.) Or they
didnāt usually post questions to their friends on Facebook, for example. For this reason, not
everyone performed all three social strategies.
17. Task performance
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each line == one fact
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
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Next, we mapped the facts subjects found to the type of behavior they were engaged in.
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...the size of the bubble represents the depth of processing of that one fact. And you can see
that some facts do become synthesized more over time. [see fact #2, #3, #4, #5, #6]
18. Results
#social #facts
ID
tactics discovered
combining social tactics
correlates better to performance S01 3 6
on our tasks than: S02 1 2
S03 3 8
social network size
ā¢ S04 1 1
ā¢ network diversity S05 2 5
(as measured by the position generator) S06 2 1
background knowledge / intrinsic
ā¢ S07 1 1
interest in topic S08 3 3
Spearman R: 0.77
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
We found that any one social tactic used on its own didnāt produce as good performance
outcomes as combining social tactics together.
This is reļ¬ected in both the total number of facts discovered in the session and how deeply
users actually processed information (which isnāt elaborated on here).
This suggests that accessing people with dierent technologies makes a dierence in their
beneļ¬t to you.
19. Results
āNow, what could I say?ā
deeper cognitive processing
of information while: āLetās see...what do I
really want to be asking?ā
Composing the question Receiving Information
More thinking, contemplation
Network No pondering or mulling over of
while crafting query (3/5 users)
(Asking) network responses (0/4 users)
Little thinking or reformulation
Targeted More synthesis of information
of problem statement
(Asking) from friendsā replies (4/5 users)
(2/7 users)
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
And looking at the cognitive processing of information, this is absolutely what we saw.
However the story is more nuanced than that:
If we divided the search phase into the question and answering components:
We found that users had more thinking and contemplation of their search problem while they
were composing the question (e.g., when posting it to a social network...)
20. Results
deeper cognitive processing
of information while:
Composing the question Receiving Information
No pondering or mulling over of
Network More thinking, contemplation
network responses (0/4 users)
(Asking) while crafting query (3/5 users)
Little thinking or reformulation
Targeted More synthesis of information
of problem statement
(Asking) from friendsā replies (4/5 users)
(2/7 users)
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
In contrast, users more deeply integrated and synthesized information from replies shared
from friends who they interacted with one-on-one.
This could be due to a number of dierent things. For one, replies on social networks tended
to be goofy, silly, or o-target. They didnāt contain any facts that helped subjects advance
their understanding of the search question. (In fact, when we followed up with these
respondents, they reported wanting to start a conversation with our users rather than help
with a substantive reply).
21. Results
deeper cognitive processing More synthesis of
of information while: information from friendsā
replies (4/5 users)
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
We can see that users paused to think about shared information from targeted asking in one
quot;
subjectās timeline: The green (asking friends) and gray bands (thinking episodes) pattern each
other. This is only illustrated for one subject, but was true for most of the subjects who
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engaged (quot; targeted asking.
in
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22. Conclusions implications
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
So we have seen how dierent types of social engagement beneļ¬t the search
process.
People serve as more than information resources; they also provide cognitive
beneļ¬ts!
In particular we saw problem reformulation while posting questions on social