Encouraging Work in Citizen Science: Experiments in Goal Setting and Anchoring

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CSCW ’16 Companion, February 27 March 02, 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-3950-6/16/02. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2869129 Abstract This paper describes the results of an online field experiment where we designed and analyzed the effects of a goal-setting tracker in an online citizen science project Floating Forest. The design of our tracker was influenced by psychology theories of anchoring and goal-setting. Our results of our experiment revealed: (1) setting goals increases annotations in a session; (2) numeric anchors influence goals; and (3) participants in the treatment who saw a prompt but did not set a goal, contributed more annotations than the participants in the control group. Our research shows how goal-setting and anchoring combine to increase work in online communities.