Overt or subtle? Supporting group conversations with automatically targeted directives

Abstract

In this paper, we present a system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting the flow of communication in a group conversation activity. The system monitors the group members' non-verbal behavior and promotes balanced participation, giving targeted directives to the participants through peripheral displays. We describe an initial study to compare two ways of influencing participants' social dynamics: overt directives, explicit recommendations of social actions displayed in the form of text; or subtle directives, where the same recommendations are provided in an implicit manner. Our study indicates that, when the participants understand how the implicit messages work, the subtle facilitation is regarded as more useful than the overt one and it is considered to more positively influence the group behavior.

Charting Subtle Interaction in the HCI Literature

“…Finally, Schiavo et al presented a system for facilitating better group conversations [67]. This used visualizations that provided "subtle directives, " in order to steer attention of the group to people not participating as much as others.…”

“…For other applications of subtle nudging, the benefits were not stated as clearly. However, there are general connections to calmness [67], as well as lower demands on effort and attention [16]. This again relates to non-intrusiveness, which could be seen as a necessary property to apply subtle nudging.…”

“…Subtle gaze direction systems all worked with visual feedback to steer the gaze [5,68,69]. Visualization were also used for social nudging [67]. Yet, for influencing attention to the body, vibrotactile [16] and thermal stimuli [39] were used.…”

“…For subtle gaze direction, the studies in the examined publications focused only on the success of directing users, not on the level of subtlety of the direction method. However, for investigating effects on group conversations, Schiavo et al used a design that allowed for comparisons between overt and subtle influencing [67]. Yet, they did not measure subtleness, but instead focused on measuring the resulting effects, such as group cohesion and attention.…”

A Comparison of Cooperative and Competitive Visualizations for Co-located Collaboration

“…These systems achieve an increase in performance and better self-regulation. However, they may also lead to frustration, social pressure and competitive behavior [1,25,29], as they allow group members to compare their performance to each other.…”