Evaluating the effect of social cues with automated experiments

Social cues present promising opportunities for facilitating collaboration online. Many interesting ideas and applications have been proposed, but there is still limited empirical understanding of the usefulness of various kinds of social cues. The contribution of this article is twofold. Firstly, we report a detailed evaluation of the social cues available in the collaborative learning environment EDUCO. Our study is based on automated experiments, in which the real social cues were occasionally replaced with artificial ones that were specifically designed for examining particular hypotheses. The results suggest that the users attend to the social cues, but do not make navigation decisions solely on the basis of social cues. Secondly, our study demonstrates the potential of automated experiments in studying behavior in virtual environments. Specific interventions made in natural circumstances can supplement other research methodologies in useful ways.