Ryan

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 😉

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!

3 Layers of Motivation (Updated for 2018)

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The more I consider motivation, the more I realise it is one of those things we in gamification use as a catch-all. It’s a bit like how we treat the term “game mechanics” and, well, gamification!

Generally speaking, you will hear the terms intrinsic and extrinsic when motivation is spoken about. You will hear Deci & Ryan, Dan Pink, Maslow and more spoken about. However, when it comes down to it our argument is always the same. Intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic rewards. At times you will also hear a further comment that a balance of extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation will yield the best results.

I myself bang on about RAMP; relatedness, autonomy, mastery and purpose. I talk about supporting these motivators with well planned and thought out extrinsic rewards and nudges. However, It seems to me that motivation has several layers and we only seem to speak about one or two of them. There is a more fundamental and base level of motivation that we all seem to ignore. I have spoken about it before here, but I wanted to make my case more clearly!

Base

Let’s think about your job for a moment. Most go to work for one reason, to earn money. Money leads to security. It provides you shelter, it keeps your family safe, it provides food for you all. Before money and jobs and the like, this was all much more primal. You secured your family by physically protecting them. You hunted for food and you built shelters. Now, this is all handled for most by getting money. We don’t need to hunt or build huts for ourselves, we buy all of those things. If we extrapolate that and take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs again, we see the most base motivations for humans are physiological needs and safety/security.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Having just shown that in this day and age, money is what provides the majority of security (including food) for most, it stands to reason that money is actually now one of our most base needs. I am not talking about being rich – rather having enough to guarantee physiological needs and safety.

Many people enjoy their job, which is great. But even those who say “I would work here if they didn’t pay me” are generally talking bollocks. You need to survive and in our world work gives you that opportunity.

Emotional/Intrinsic

Once these base needs and motivations are satisfied, then we can focus on the other more emotional motivations, which this is where RAMP starts to come in. Our need for relatedness, autonomy, mastery, purpose, status, friendship etc.

Trivial/Extrinsic

Finally, we can look at the trivial things. More money than we need to survive, bonuses and other types of extrinsic rewards. In gamification things like points, badges, leaderboards, competitions, prizes etc.

Adding Some Clarity (2018 Update)

As linear as this all seems, satisfy the bottom layer, then the middle, then use gamification, it isn’t that simple. Short term engagement using extrinsic gamification can work fine, whatever the other needs may be, but it will have no sustainability. Also, what one person finds extrinsically motivating, others may find much more intrinsic.

The other key one to look at is Money in the base layer and Excess Bonuses being in the trivial/extrinsic section. Money is a base need these days, it is what helps us to guarantee security. Having more than we need is also not a terrible thing, money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy a lot of stuff that can go towards making you happy! However, there is a point where money is no longer the biggest interest. In a job you hate, you don’t tend to leave because of the money, it is other factors. If you are then offered more money, it rarely makes you change your mind as the rest of the environment is the same! If you have enough money to be at least comfortable, then excess bonuses are not going to provide long-term motivation to do good work.

Excess bouses can also lead to terrible behaviour, with overjustification effect being a massive issue. If you are just working for the money, quality can be affected as can decision making. Did you make the decision because it was best for the customer, or because it helped you get your bonus?

Anyway, if you are going to use my 3 Layers of Motivation, please use this image from now on 🙂

Using this in Gamification

The question becomes, how can we benefit from this knowledge in gamification? The answer is, by understanding what people actually need. Forget motivation for a moment, and look at base needs. If a person feels they cannot support themselves and guarantee the security and safety of their family – no amount of emotional or trivial motivation is going to actually motivate them, at least not in the way you are probably hoping it will.

This is obviously focused on Enterprise gamification. It is not the job of an advertising company using gamification to sell a product, to ensure the base needs of their target audience. This is the job of the individual and their employer. However, if their target audience does not feel they have their base needs satisfied by work or other means, it is pretty unlikely that the advertising will work on them, gamified or otherwise!

In the enterprise, be aware that if your employees are struggling financially and it is perceived that you could improve this, gamification could seriously backfire. The money you spend on that could be seen to be spent on improving the lives of the employees at a base level rather than a trivial one!

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