# Collaborative Facilitation and Collaborative Inhibition in Virtual Environments
## 1 Introduction
### Effects of Social Processes on Collaborative Learning: The Importance of Social Interaction  
In general, different social processes have been hypothesized to facilitate or inhibit the performance of a group [9]. Considering the mechanisms underlying collaborative facilitation, observational learning appears as a social process that showed positive effects on the collaborative learning [35; 36]. Furthermore, the motivation may be increased in a collaborative learning context because the members of the group seem to develop a common ground of shared motivational processes [37]. For what concerns social factors that could contribute to collaborative inhibition, some researchers recognized the process of social loafing as a relevant factor [38; 39]. Social loafing occurs when a group's member applies less effort to obtain a goal when he/she works in a group than alone because he/she has the belief that someone else in the group will contribute to the task. Another social process involved in the collaborative inhibition is the sucker effect [40], which occurs when the more productive group's members reduce their individual efforts because they recognize that other co-members did not contribute. Instead, the free-rider effect occurs when the non-contributing members feel that the more productive group's members are doing enough, so they do not need to contribute [41]. Moreover, the social pressure or group conformity [42], and the fear of evaluation from individuals in the group [43; 44] can be further mechanisms involved in the collaborative inhibition. Hence, individuals in a group might not share their opinions and solutions, non-participating to the task, fearing a negative evaluation from others [9].  
To better understand which variables affect the CSCL, it is necessary to analyze the social interactions among group members if we really want to understand the implications of its use [45]. Several variables (e.g., the size of the group, the composition of the group, the nature of the task, the learning styles) could be important factors which influence the effectiveness of collaborative learning, but all these factors are related to a key variable: the social interaction [46; 47]. Such element seems particularly significant in the CSCL, as social interaction is the tool through which participants, verbalizing their opinions, may develop a collective knowledge in order to reach the group's purposes [46]. Participants' interactions are one of the most significant indicators of success in online environments [48]. More specifically, the interaction styles were positively related to the performance of virtual teams [49]. About this, a software called Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC; [50]) is able to evaluate the content of a social interaction, by coding transcripts on a word-by-word basis, and comparing words with a dictionary divided into 80 linguistic dimensions (e.g., affective terms, cognitive terms, social and communicative processes) [51]. Then, it allows to obtain information about the members of the interaction, as the presence of self-disclosed people is suggested by a high number of words in virtual interactions [52], while the use of negations appears to be related to a cognitive complexity [53]. Moreover, using more third person pronouns appears to enhance a focus on others, and to be related with adaptive coping [53]. Such a software is also applied in this study, to analyze the linguistic content of virtual interactions between members of the groups.