Dr. Ben Marder Discussing Online Review Sites and Emotions

Our colleague Ben Marder from the University of Edinburgh Business School visited the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society from Monday, 12 November 2018 to Thursday, 15 November 2018. He held a lunch talk and discussion on how online review sites impact emotions and motivations of service employees. In particular, Ben presented work in progress that examines the impact of review site (e.g. Tripadvisor) saliency in the minds of service employees on their emotions and motivation to satisfy consumers. As an overarching question, Ben and his colleagues ask whether the invisible eyes of the TripAdvisor owl make people work harder. This project leads on from a paper called the ‘Extended Chilling Effect’ of social media, published in Computers in Human Behavior, that found that Facebook users constrain their actions in offline ‘in reality’ in fear of peer surveillance.