That’s Not Who I Am! Investigating the Role of Uniqueness and Belongingness for Designing Successful Personalized Recommendations

Abstract

Although many firms rely on personalization to enhance the user experience of their digital service, their efforts might backfire if users feel misunderstood by the personalized offerings. So far, the psychological processes underlying the phenomenon of feeling misunderstood by personalization systems and potential means to alleviate this perception remain largely uninvestigated. Building on the psychological concepts of uniqueness and belongingness, we propose a framework to investigate how transparency impacts users’ feeling of being misunderstood by personalization systems. To test our research model, we conduct an online experiment using Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” playlist. The results show that considering not only users’ uniqueness but especially their belongingness is decisive to avoid misunderstanding. Further, we find that transparent explanations of the system’s inner workings elicit a feeling of control among users, which fosters the perception that both users’ uniqueness and belongingness are considered, resulting in less misunderstanding and continued usage.