Harness the Wisdom of Crowds: The Importance of We-Intention in Social Computing Research

Today, the growth and popularity of social computing greatly facilitate online collaboration in creating user-centered networked content. This chapter explores participation behaviors in social computing communities, conceptualizing them as group-referent intentional social actions. The authors identify the concept of “we-intention”, which reflects an individual’s perception of the extent to which all participants in a collectivity will engage in the joint action and act together, as a topic of theoretical and practical interest. A preliminary conceptual framework was further developed and, in particular, the collectively shared beliefs (i.e., collective attitude and collective efficacy) and the social influence processes (i.e., subjective norms, group norms and social identity) were regarded as the key predictors of participation we-intention in social computing communities. This chapter finally concludes with a discussion on future research directions in the areas of we-intention and social computing.