Safe to Stay: Psychological Safety Sustains Participation in Pull-based Open Source Projects

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17510v2
• Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:21:19 GMT
• Title: Safe to Stay: Psychological Safety Sustains Participation in Pull-based Open Source Projects
• Authors: Emeralda Sesari, Federica Sarro, Ayushi Rastogi,
• Abstract summary: Psychological safety refers to the belief that team members can speak up or make mistakes without fear of negative consequences.<n>This study investigates whether team-level psychological safety is associated with contributors' sustained participation in open-source projects.
• Score: 9.312605205492456
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Background: Psychological safety refers to the belief that team members can speak up or make mistakes without fear of negative consequences. While it is recognized as important in traditional software teams, its role in open-source software development remains understudied. Open-source contributors often collaborate without formal roles or structures, where interpersonal relationships can significantly influence participation. Code review, a central and collaborative activity in modern software development, offers a valuable context for observing such team interactions. Aims: This study investigates whether team-level psychological safety, inferred from code review activities, is associated with contributors' sustained participation in open-source projects. Method: Using data from 60,684 pull requests across multiple repositories, we developed a psychological safety index based on observable cues such as merge decisions, comment activity, interaction diversity, and mentions. We analyzed the relationship between this index and contributors' short-term (within 1 year) and long-term (over 4--5 years) sustained participation using three logistic regression models. Results: Contributors are more likely to remain active in repositories with higher levels of psychological safety. Psychological safety is positively associated with both short-term and long-term sustained participation. However, prior participation emerges as a stronger predictor of future engagement, reducing the effect of psychological safety when accounted for. Conclusions: This study introduces a scalable, data-driven approach to measuring psychological safety through pull request data and provides new empirical evidence of its relevance in sustaining participation within open-source development.

Related papers

• Is It Safe To Learn And Share? On Psychological Safety and Social Learning in (Agile) Communities of Practice [4.662447283600293]
  Communities of Practice (CoPs) are increasingly adopted to support social learning beyond formal education.<n> psychological safety, a prerequisite for effective learning, remains insufficiently understood in these settings.<n>This study investigates psychological safety within Agile CoPs through survey data from 143 participants.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-30T19:06:43Z)
• "Is This Really a Human Peer Supporter?": Misalignments Between Peer Supporters and Experts in LLM-Supported Interactions [5.481575506447599]
  Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support.<n>LLMs present new opportunities to enhance peer support interactions, particularly in real-time, text-based interactions.<n>We present and evaluate an AI-supported system with an LLM-simulated distressed client, context-sensitive LLM-generated suggestions, and real-time emotion visualisations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-11T03:06:41Z)
• The Factors Influencing Well-Being in Software Engineers: A Cross-Country Mixed-Method Study [7.388864936625697]
  Despite increasing recognition of mental health challenges in software engineering, few studies focus on the factors that sustain or undermine well-being. This study fills this gap by investigating the specific factors affecting the well-being of software engineers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-02T14:51:58Z)
• Towards Emotionally Intelligent Software Engineers: Understanding Students' Self-Perceptions After a Cooperative Learning Experience [3.001523463519739]
  Emotional Intelligence (EI) can impact Software Engineering (SE) outcomes through improved team communication, conflict resolution, and stress management.<n>Despite EI's documented importance in professional practice, SE education continues to prioritize technical knowledge over emotional and social competencies.<n>This paper analyzes SE students' self-perceptions of their EI after a two-month cooperative learning project.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-07T17:29:08Z)
• Collaborative Gym: A Framework for Enabling and Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration [51.452664740963066]
  Collaborative Gym is a framework enabling asynchronous, tripartite interaction among agents, humans, and task environments. We instantiate Co-Gym with three representative tasks in both simulated and real-world conditions. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in task performance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-20T09:21:15Z)
• User Personas Improve Social Sustainability by Encouraging Software Developers to Deprioritize Antisocial Features [12.39954082248472]
  The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of two interventions-stakeholder maps and persona models. We conducted a randomized controlled factorial experiment with 79 undergraduate computer science students.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-14T04:20:20Z)
• Linkage on Security, Privacy and Fairness in Federated Learning: New Balances and New Perspectives [48.48294460952039]
  This survey offers comprehensive descriptions of the privacy, security, and fairness issues in federated learning. We contend that there exists a trade-off between privacy and fairness and between security and sharing.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-16T10:31:45Z)
• SoK (or SoLK?): On the Quantitative Study of Sociodemographic Factors and Computer Security Behaviors [31.18834611268347]
  We survey existing scholarship on sociodemographics and secure behavior. We then conduct a focused literature review of 47 papers to synthesize what is currently known and identify open questions for future research. By incorporating contemporary social and critical theories, we establish guidelines for future studies of sociodemographic factors and security behaviors. We present a case study to demonstrate our guidelines in action, at-scale, that conduct a measurement study of the relationships between sociodemographics and de-identified, aggregated log data of security and privacy behaviors among 16,829 users on Facebook across 16 countries.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-15T23:56:03Z)
• PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety [70.84902425123406]
  Multi-agent systems, when enhanced with Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit profound capabilities in collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. We propose a framework (PsySafe) grounded in agent psychology, focusing on identifying how dark personality traits in agents can lead to risky behaviors. Our experiments reveal several intriguing phenomena, such as the collective dangerous behaviors among agents, agents' self-reflection when engaging in dangerous behavior, and the correlation between agents' psychological assessments and dangerous behaviors.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-22T12:11:55Z)
• Detecting and Optimising Team Interactions in Software Development [58.720142291102135]
  This paper presents a data-driven approach to detect the functional interaction structure for software development teams. Our approach considers differences in the activity levels of team members and uses a block-constrained configuration model. We show how our approach enables teams to compare their functional interaction structure against synthetically created benchmark scenarios.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-28T14:53:29Z)
• Getting Users Smart Quick about Security: Results from 90 Minutes of Using a Persuasive Toolkit for Facilitating Information Security Problem Solving by Non-Professionals [2.4923006485141284]
  A balanced level of user engagement in security is difficult to achieve due to difference of priorities between the business perspective and the security perspective. We have developed a persuasive software toolkit to engage users in structured discussions about security vulnerabilities in their company. In the research reported here we examine how non-professionals perceived security problems through a short-term use of the toolkit.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-09-06T11:37:21Z)
• Co-Located Human-Human Interaction Analysis using Nonverbal Cues: A Survey [71.43956423427397]
  We aim to identify the nonverbal cues and computational methodologies resulting in effective performance. This survey differs from its counterparts by involving the widest spectrum of social phenomena and interaction settings. Some major observations are: the most often used nonverbal cue, computational method, interaction environment, and sensing approach are speaking activity, support vector machines, and meetings composed of 3-4 persons equipped with microphones and cameras, respectively.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-07-20T13:37:57Z)
• Hidden Agenda: a Social Deduction Game with Diverse Learned Equilibria [57.74495091445414]
  Social deduction games offer an avenue to study how individuals might learn to synthesize potentially unreliable information about others. In this work, we present Hidden Agenda, a two-team social deduction game that provides a 2D environment for studying learning agents in scenarios of unknown team alignment. Reinforcement learning agents trained in Hidden Agenda show that agents can learn a variety of behaviors, including partnering and voting without need for communication in natural language.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-01-05T20:54:10Z)
• Personalized multi-faceted trust modeling to determine trust links in social media and its potential for misinformation management [61.88858330222619]
  We present an approach for predicting trust links between peers in social media. We propose a data-driven multi-faceted trust modeling which incorporates many distinct features for a comprehensive analysis. Illustrated in a trust-aware item recommendation task, we evaluate the proposed framework in the context of a large Yelp dataset.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-11T19:40:51Z)
• Incorporating Rivalry in Reinforcement Learning for a Competitive Game [65.2200847818153]
  This study focuses on providing a novel learning mechanism based on a rivalry social impact. Based on the concept of competitive rivalry, our analysis aims to investigate if we can change the assessment of these agents from a human perspective.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-11-02T21:54:18Z)
• Bursts of Activity: Temporal Patterns of Help-Seeking and Support in Online Mental Health Forums [6.662800021628275]
  We show that user activity on social media platforms follows a distinct pattern of high activity periods with interleaving periods of no activity. We then show how studying activity during bursts can provide a personalized, medium-term analysis for a key question in online mental health communities. Using two independent outcome metrics, moments of cognitive change and self-reported changes in mood during a burst of activity, we identify two actionable features that can improve outcomes for users.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-21T22:39:38Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.