Effects of Collective Socialization on Newcomers’ Response to Feedback in Online Communities

Abstract

Collective socialization involves introducing new members to an organization as a group or cohort. In traditional offline organizations, collective socialization is a standard and effective socialization strategy. This article investigates the impact of collective socialization on newcomers’ motivation and learning in an online community and the effect it has on newcomers’ reaction to feedback from the community. One observational field study and two random-assignment experiments involving editing Wikipedia articles show that collective socialization altered the way newcomers responded to feedback from the community. The observational study of students editing Wikipedia articles as part of a classroom assignment found that those who worked relatively independently without peer support made more edits in response to critical, negative feedback, presumably to fix errors, whereas students who had peer support did not. Two experiments in which Mechanical Turk workers edited Wikipedia articles independently or in a group found that working in a group diffused the impact of both positive and negative feedback. We discuss these findings, which highlight the importance of considering the negative consequences of introducing a new socialization practice to an online community.