The Tribute to G.M. Andreeva: the Role of Technological Innovations in Social Change

Abstract

Background. Technological innovations have become an important agent of social change, creating new socio-psychological meaning. In this context, G.M. Andreeva's idea that social psychology should help people adapt to changing environments remains relevant. Objectives. This paper aims to highlight the socio-psychological perspective on the role of innovative technologies in social change. We present two empirical studies that demonstrate emerging socio-psychological patterns in the context of open-source software development (study 1) and the use of virtual assistants (VA) for economic decision-making (study 2). Study Participants. Study (1): 900 posts from a collaborative development platform. Study (2): 200 users of the VA popular in Russia, residents of Russian cities with a population of more than 500,000 people. Methods. Study (1): Content analysis using large language models. Study (2): Quantitative online survey assessed users' perception of their VA and previously unknown VA across 15 characteristics, subjective trust levels, and economic trust through scenarios involving monetary transactions. Results. Study (1): A pre-configured GPT-4 turbo model with an instruction consisting of two examples achieved 56% accuracy in classification. Using a fine-tuned model of the previous generation, DeBERTa-v3-Small, increased the efficiency of classifying developer messages by up to 70%. This allowed the model to be used to encode developer interactions in order to identify the factors that contribute to effective collaboration. Study (2): Both forms of trust (declared and economic) are significantly related to components of social representations (SR) of VA. Individual components of these perceptions correlate with both declared and economic trust at the level of r > 0.3, p < 0.05. However, there is a difference in the strength of these relationships for familiar and unfamiliar VAs. An assumption can be made about the possible influence of the duration of use of VA on the strength of connections between SR and trust in VA. Thus, SR formed through interaction with VA contributes to a trusting attitude towards it and, accordingly, to decision-making processes involving its use. Conclusions. Socio-psychological knowledge about the changing socio-psychological meaning can form the foundation for the development of human-centered technologies. As a part of professional work, a developer can improve current tools for the creation, management, and optimization of collaborative activities. In everyday life, it is also important to establish a level of trust that is appropriate for the situation in which a Virtual Assistant is used.

Keywords

• technological innovations
• open source software
• efficiency of joint activities
• large language models
• virtual assistant
• trust
• artificial intelligence
• social representations