Self-Disclosure for Early Relationship Development through Situated Prompts in Opportunistic Collective Experiences
Cindy Hsinyu Hu · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts · 2022
Though existing social technologies provide new opportunities for individuals to make new friends outside of their busy schedules, the lack of assistance to scaffold interactions creates anxiety and high mental efforts that make initiating and deepening the connection with strangers challenging. In this paper, we present Cerebro, a context-aware system that encourages self-disclosure between strangers by engaging users in Opportunistic Collective Experiences (OCEs) with situated prompts. OCEs provide a clear participation structure and ground the users’ interactions on their shared physical affordances, and in addition to sharing their experiences, the situated prompts encourage users to share personal decisions that their partner can potentially relate to. Through a deployment study with 8 users, we found that (1) the ease in completing OCEs leads to active engagement and constant self-disclosure on Cerebro, and (2) shared collective experiences surface new common grounds to support follow-up interactions and self-disclosure after both completing the same experience.