Group awareness and self-presentation in computer-supported information exchange

11 Abstract A common challenge in many situations of computer-supported collaborative 12 learning is increasing the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other 13 group members. As a prototypical situation of computer-supported information exchange, a 14 shared-database setting was chosen for the current study. This information-exchange 15 situation represented a social dilemma: while the contribution of information to a shared 16 database induced costs and provided no benefit for the individual, the entire group suffered 17 when all members decided to withhold information. In order to alleviate the information18 exchange dilemma, a group-awareness tool was employed. It was hypothesized that 19 participants would use group awareness for self-presentational purposes. For the 20 examination of this assumption, the personality variable ‘protective self-presentation’ 21 (PSP) was measured. An interaction effect of group awareness and PSP was found: when 22 an awareness tool provided information concerning the contribution behavior of each 23 individual, this tool was used as a self-presentation opportunity. In order to understand this 24 effect in more detail, single items of the PSP-scale were analyzed.