Increasingly, the advice people receive on the Internet is socially transparent in the sense that it displays contextual information about the advice-givers or their actions. We hypothesize that activity transparency -seeing an advice giver's process while creating his or her recommendations - will increase advice taking. We report three experiments testing the effect of activity transparency on taking mediocre advice. We found that the presence of a web history increased the likelihood of following a financial advisor's advice and reduced participant earnings (Exp. 1), especially when the web history implied greater task focus (Exp. 2, 3). CSCW research usually emphasizes how to increase information sharing; this work suggests when shared information may be inappropriate. We suggest ways to counter activity transparency's potential downsides.
['Duyen T. Nguyen', 'Laura Dabbish', 'Sara Kiesler']
The Perverse Effects of Social Transparency on Online Advice Taking