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User Types HEXAD: What Links Philanthropists to Socialisers

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Hexad Evolution 2 User Types HEXAD What Links Philanthropists to Socialisers

A new paper looking to validate the User Types HEXAD Survey has just been released from the HCI Games Group (Games Institute, and Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo). You can find it here Empirical validation of the Gamification User Types Hexad scale in English and Spanish or free… http://hcigames.com/download/empirical-validation-hexad-scale/

One of the findings is something that has been noted before and is not a surprise to me, but something I realise I have never explained. The finding is that the Philanthropist and Socialiser types are very closely linked when you look into them.

Furthermore, the evidence suggests there is a stronger correlation between the Philanthropist and Socialiser types than the theory anticipated, suggesting the possibility of an improvement to the theory itself, i.e., it should acknowledge that a person who is highly motivated by philanthropism will probably also be motivated by socialization in some degree, and vice versa. [1]

Now, as I say, this is not a surprise to me, but is something that I have never explained – which surprises me!

The Origin Story

If you look at the original User Types I created in 2012 or so, you will see that I had 4 types to start with, just the intrinsic types Socialiser, Achiever, Philanthropist and Free Spirit. This expanded into a 3D model and eventually contracted into the HEXAD for practical reasons!

The original 4 were based on two things initially. Self Determination Theory and Dan Pinks Drive. Both identify 3 key areas of motivation but differ slightly.

Self-Determination Theory Drive
Competence Mastery
Autonomy Autonomy
Relatedness
Purpose

When I started to dive into it I made a decision, I was going to combine them into what you know now as RAMP, Relatedness, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. However, Purpose was focused on altruistic purpose rather than meaningful purpose. All types are driven by their own Purpose and meaning, but this specific group had a more focused purpose that was selfless in nature. I even asked Edward Deci about it and he pointed me to a paper [2] “The darker and brighter sides of human existence: Basic psychological needs as a unifying concept” where they discussed why meaning was not considered as a need in Self Determination Theory.

Social Philanthropists

However, and this is the important bit when you actually look into it carefully you will discover that relatedness and altruistic purpose are strongly linked. It makes sense, they both are about people and relationships. You can’t be altruistic if there is no one around to be altruistic towards! So it makes sense that a Philanthropic user would probably score highly on the Socailsiser scale.

Keep in mind, this was a tool built to help gamification designers. The reason I separated them was to help them with their thinking. Just because someone is looking for social mechanics, does not mean they will automatically be philanthropic in nature. So when building systems that require philanthropy I felt it was helpful to consider them slightly differently, hence I gave them their own sets of mechanics. In reality, those mechanics overlap slightly and that was to be expected, but it is interesting to see that proven now!

So, when building solutions that are aimed at Philanthropists, remember to think about Socialisers as well!

Citations

[1] Tondello, Gustavo F, et al. “Empirical Validation of the Gamification User Types Hexad Scale in English and Spanish.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Academic Press, 13 Oct. 2018, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1071581918306001

[2] Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “The Darker and Brighter Sides of Human Existence: Basic Psychological Needs as a Unifying Concept.” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 11, no. 4, 2000, pp. 319–338., doi:10.1207/s15327965pli1104_03.

Correcting the Misconceptions Around the Philanthropist User Type and Purpose

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One of the things that happens when you create popular frameworks and the like, is that people like to interpret them to fit their needs. This is why I created the User Types Hexad in the first place – so that I no longer had to interpret Bartle’s Player Types to fit my needs in gamification!

However, what can happen is that the interpretations become more popular than the original and if you are not careful the meaning of the original is lost. This is true of one of the types in my Hexad – and I am not innocent in the issue! I have allowed the change to happen, even integrating it into the types and my motivation framework RAMP. The type in question is the Philanthropist and the motivation Purpose.

When I first started, these both had a clear meaning, but I have allowed that to get diluted and confused, so I wanted to set the record straight and offer some reasoning behind it all.

Meaningful Purpose and Altruistic Purpose

First, we will tackle Purpose. When I speak about purpose in RAMP, I am specifically talking about altruistic purpose. This is the desire to help others in some way1 – hence the type that evolved from that is the Philanthropist. You can define philanthropy on a basic level as “The desire to increase the well-being of humankind”. That is what I had in mind.

The other type of purpose, the one that I have allowed to creep into the definition is meaningful purpose. This is more a desire to understand the meaning of what you are doing. The analogy I use for this I call the little cog.

The Little Cog: By Andrzej Marczewski Age 38
 
There was once a little cog who spent all day spinning as fast as he could in a huge machine.
One day he rather sadly asked a bigger cog “Why am I doing this? Surely, I am of no importance to such a huge machine, especially compared to the likes of you larger cogs?”
The big cog smiled at him and replied: “Slow down a moment and see what happens to the rest of us.” The small cog slowed down and saw that every other cog began to slow down as well. He looked at the big cog as if to ask a question.
The big cog said to him “Every cog in this machine has a job and a significance. If one stops doing their job, the rest are no longer able to do theirs either. Every cog, no matter how big or little, is important to the machine.”
With that the little cog smiled, realising that his existence had a meaning. He had a purpose and without him, no other cog could fully achieve theirs.
From that day on, he happily span as fast as he could.

This type of purpose has been explored by Adam M. Grant in his paper The Significance of Task Significance: Job Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions 2. In this paper, Grant concludes that job performance increases when people have a better understanding of its significance.

Task significance cues may thereby play an important role in contributing to the performance of employees and to the welfare of the individuals, groups, communities, and societies they serve

This type of meaningful purpose is experienced by everyone, it is not unique to Philanthropist types.

Philanthropists

When you look back at Self-Determination Theory 3, purpose is not included as a separate motivation. That was Dan Pink’s change for his book Drive 4. Deci and Ryan actually explain that altruistic purpose is part of relatedness 5.  Recent data based on the User Type test would tend to agree with this. Socialisers and Philanthropists seem to share a lot of traits. Obviously, once the data is validated I will share it. When you think about it though, that makes a lot of sense. Philanthropists want to help people – you need people for that! The reason I separated them was because I felt that there is a difference between encouraging philanthropic behaviour and pro-social behaviour. This meant that these two types of users, though connected, are no identical. You can have a person who is motivated by social connectedness, but that does not see much joy in answering questions for others!

In a nutshell

  • Philanthropists are focused on altruistic purpose – a desire to improve the lives of others.
  • Purpose, as described in RAMP, is focused on altruistic purpose.
  • Meaningful purpose, the desire to understands one’s place in the world and derive meaning from that, is a universal motivation that is not specific to any one User Type.

Citations

  1. Sigmund K, Hauert C. Altruism. Curr Biol. 2002;12(8):R270-R272. doi:10.1016/S0960-9822(02)00797-2.
  2. Grant AM. The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. J Appl Psychol. 2008;93(1):108-124. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.108.
  3. Deci EL, Koestner R, Ryan RM. A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychol Bull. 1999;125:627-668-700. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627.
  4. Pink DH. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. Canongate; 2009. doi:10.1002/casp.
  5. Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “The Darker and Brighter Sides of Human Existence: Basic Psychological Needs as a Unifying Concept.” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 11, no. 4, 2000, pp. 319–338., doi:10.1207/s15327965pli1104_03.

 

 

Free Chapter – And Some Gamification Tips

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Just as New Year passes us, I thought I would throw out a free chapter from my book. It is one of my favorites actually, all about loyalty!

Free Chapter on Loyalty

Now for the tips mentioned in the title :).

If you are looking at gamification in 2016, there are a few things you really need to know about. I am not going to just give it to you, where is the fun in that? Search the site, search Google and see what you can find out!

  1. Intrinsic Motivation
  2. Self Determination Theory
  3. Overjustification Effect. Really important to understand!
  4. Competition vs Collaboration
  5. MDA Framework
  6. 4 Keys 2 Fun
  7. Serious games, Games based learning
  8. Play
  9. Player / User Types
  10. Gamification Code of Ethics

Let me know if you have any questions 😉

Gamification is sh1t. Let’s make it better.

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I thought that might get your attention. Excuse the contrived use of the 1 in shit there as well, firewalls can be so jumpy about certain words.

Now back to my point.

Gamification, in far too many cases right now,  is indeed shit. I am not saying gamification itself is bad, just a lot of the uses and applications of gamification that we are seeing out there falls into that particularly odorous category.

It’s as if gamification has become the duct tape of user design. “The user experience is a bit off, what should we do? Add gamification”. “The system is not great, people get stuck and don’t like using it, what should we do? Add gamification – points and badges will fix it!”. “We need to improve efficiency in the department. How can we do that? A leaderboard you say? Let’s do it!”

Rather than using gamification as part of the overall design, to help enrich the user journey and experience, it is used to patch bad design – making it ultimately worse. Gamification is not a solution looking for a problem, it is a way of thinking and designing that puts the user at the centre of the experience. If it is not done this way it will fail and fail in terrible ways!

We can make this better and here are a few ways you can start.

Think RAMP.

  1. Give people the chance to work together – relatedness. Make them feel part of something. Collaboration should be your first thought, not competition. Use the technologies available to connect people beyond their usual working set – there is no such thing as a global boundary these days.
  2. Give them autonomy, freedom to make mistakes and to find the best way for them to work. Your way is not their way and your game is not their game! Celebrate differences as given some time and some freedom, you may find others have much better ideas than you. Don’t be afraid to loosen the reigns a little.
  3. What ever gamification you decide to use, make sure that it gives people a real sense that their achievements mean something. I don’t mean achievements like trophies, I mean real achievements. Celebrate new products, innovative ideas, academic achievement, losing weight, running an extra mile. Make them feel that these achievements meant something to you as much as it meant something to them.
  4. What ever you are trying to achieve with your system, think about why the user would be interested – what is their purpose within it. Every machine runs because every part does its job efficiently and effectively – no matter how small.  Give everyone a sense of where they fit and how important they are to the overall success. Give them an idea of what they are working towards and milestones to help the gauge how close they are.
  5. If you have to use rewards or incentives (and really you should not have to), make them relevant and in line with the task and the people. An iPad may be a nice prize for a member of your team, not too expensive, but something they may want. However, if you are looking at a more global group – an iPad could be much more valuable to people in some countries than others. If the prize is too big in comparison to the task, people will game the system to get it. Remember over justification – you want people doing something because they want to do well at it – not just because they want the prize.
  6. Make it clear how success is measured and fed back to the users. There is nothing worse than suddenly finding you had achieved something, but have no idea how you did it. Actually, there is one thing worse – finding someone has achieved something you think you should have achieved and having no idea how they did it or how the scoring worked!
  7. It’s not about fun and games. Don’t just think you can add what you think is fun or build what you think is a game and it will suddenly solve all of your engagement issues. Test things with your potential users and hire people or companies that know what they are doing. Unless you are an expert in gamification or you have the flexibility to fail – let the experts do it.
  8. Finally and most importantly – honesty and transparency. You are trying to make things better. Clouding your purpose and trying to trick people into doing things is not the right way and is destined to fail.

Don’t prove the haters right. gamification is not a bullshit concept – it is great but needs to mature and be treated with care.

 

Points & Badges Video Tutorial

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The fourth video in my series of tutorials (finally!!)

This one is just a short (10 minute) look at points and badges in gamified systems and how to make some use of them. Not all that different from my Points and Badges: Not Totally Evil blog post, but also talks about balancing and best use case.

Enjoy!

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