marientina

A good friend and collaborator, Mina Vasalou does research on some very controversial topics on human-computer interaction. Given our talks about BackChannel and social behaviour, I find her work now even more interesting:

One of her latest papers:

DigitalBlush: Towards a self-conscious community
In human societies, behavior is often mediated by a set of rules which if broken, have practical (i.e. tarred reputation) as well as emotional consequences (i.e. feeling shame for one’s action). It is fear for both sanctions that leads to norm internalization. Trust and reputation mechanisms have focused on the practical consequences, neglecting to account for the weight of emotions. In this article, we present shame and embarrassment as a possible behavior-controlling mechanism working on an emotional level and strengthening current trust and reputation systems. Through a three line inquiry, we discuss our future work joining into a single objective: to develop a self-conscious community whose members may engage in controlled and even more importantly, prosocial behaviors towards other members.