Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 251

When people work together on a one-to-one basis (in dyads or pairs), the way
they communicate can be understood using techniques such as conversation
analysis and linguistic analyses of the creation of a shared model or common
ground (e.g., Clark and Brennan 1991a , b ; Gottman et al. 2005 ; Sacks 1992 ; ten
Have 1999 ). The notion of common ground also applies to communication among
larger groups.
If you analyze how people talk to one another you will quickly see that it is rare
for them to speak in full sentences and to always wait politely for the other person
to finish before starting to speak themselves. The overall aim of this level of
analysis is usually to generate a shared mutual understanding of the situation at
hand. This can provide insights of how to support computer-supported commu-
nication (see, for example, Brennan 1998 ). For example, if the length of a pause in
conversation is 1s, then if there are lags in the network approaching 1s, some users
will start talking too soon (Ruhleder and Jordan 1999 ). If the task is computer-
based (or at least requires information from the system), you will need to under-
stand what sort of information is needed and used, and present it in such a way that
it helps to facilitate a shared mental model of the situation between those com-
municating. Conversational analysis and the concept of common ground also are
useful for analyzing larger groups.
9.2.3 Exchange Costs and Benefits
The second type of analysis involves looking at the costs and benefits of social
interactions, a so-called payoff approach. In this approach, each interaction has
associated with it a cost, a benefit (sometimes called a payoff), or both. Work in
game theory will often lump costs and benefits together and call them payoffs. This
approach has been used in many fields, but it is probably most closely associated
with economics where it is extensively used (e.g., Levitt and Dubner 2005 ).
There are situations where people who are supposed to work together to achieve
a particular goal, or perform a particular task, do not do so. Instead, they may pursue
individual goals and decide what is best for themselves on the basis of the costs and
benefits involved. In many cases, the payoffs are not financial rewards, but can be
things like improved social status, for example, which is how companies entice
people to provide useful content for their internal social networking applications.
The problems that can arise when people pursue individual goals (and payoffs)
are highlighted by the classical Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) problem (Axelrod 1984 ).
The central dilemma is whether to think about the costs and payoffs altruistically
(as they affect the pair jointly), or as they affect each prisoner individually. You
can see the costs and payoffs by drawing a matrix for all of the actors involved,
like that shown in Table 9.1 for a Prisoner's Dilemma problem with two prisoners.
In the Prisoner's Dilemma, two prisoners have been caught doing something
illegal, and can either plead not guilty or plead guilty giving state's evidence