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Curiosity Killed the Cat, but Makes Crowdwork Better

Published: 07 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Crowdsourcing systems are designed to elicit help from humans to accomplish tasks that are still difficult for computers. How to motivate workers to stay longer and/or perform better in crowdsourcing systems is a critical question for designers. Previous work have explored different motivational frameworks, both extrinsic and intrinsic. In this work, we examine the potential for curiosity as a new type of intrinsic motivational driver to incentivize crowd workers. We design crowdsourcing task interfaces that explicitly incorporate mechanisms to induce curiosity and conduct a set of experiments on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Our experiment results show that curiosity interventions improve worker retention without degrading performance, and the magnitude of the effects are influenced by both personal characteristics of the worker and the nature of the task.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2016
    6108 pages
    ISBN:9781450333627
    DOI:10.1145/2858036
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    Published: 07 May 2016

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    2. curiosity
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