Applying a multi-dimensional hedonic concept of intrinsic motivation on social tagging tools: A theoretical model and empirical validation

Participation in and adding content to social tagging tools is important for these tools to achieve their purpose of classifying and organizing information. Users of social tagging tools are driven to participate and add tags by extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is dominating research as a main predictor of why users use information systems. Social tagging tools, as a subset of social media tools, are distinguished by their unique social aspect that makes intrinsic motivation a potential driver for users to add tags to content. Intrinsic motivation, when applied to social tagging tools, could entail many shades that represent different users' motives for using such tools. In this paper, we add a rich concept of intrinsic motivation to include hedonism as a main predictor of users' behavior on social tagging tools. We empirically validate a previously proposed theoretical model of three dimensional concepts of hedonism with three components describing individuals' hedonic state when interacting with social tagging tools: explorability, curiosity, and enjoyment. After a robust and thorough data analysis using structured equation modeling, the results confirm our theoretical model and suggest using a richer concept of enjoyment to reflect a hedonic dimension when investigating intrinsic motivation with interactive social media tools. Our validated model could be the spark of new factors that have the potential to influence user acceptance of information systems in general and in social media tools. This research contributes to the development of attitude-behavior theories that could explain users' acceptance of dynamic web.