Distorting Social Feedback in Visualizations of Conversation

Real-time collaborative visualization of conversation affects small group dynamics and encourages balanced participation. Visual feedback plays the role of a gentle moderator encouraging a speaker to yield the floor. To better evaluate the effect of visual feedback on collaboration, we purposefully distorted the apparent balance in the Conversation Clock, a shared visualization of conversation. We present a pilot study examining various distortion strategies followed by a more in depth study applying distortion to discussion. Our results indicate that participants will accept some significantly distorted visualizations as an accurate representation of conversation, however, distorted feedback provides only minimal impact on conversational balance. These findings suggest the mechanism in visualization that drives individuals towards balanced conversation is not solely influenced by the visual feedback and remains an open question for future work.