From Participation to Relational Engagement: Psychological Ownership in Digital Petitions

Online petitions are a central tool of digital advocacy, but often collapse into “slacktivism”—minimal engagement that rarely leads to meaningful change. We use Psychological Ownership (PO) as a design lens to evaluate how the sense of “mineness” can deepen participation into richer relational engagement with a cause. Across six Research through Design (RtD) cycles, we embedded a lightweight watch-and-record video module into petition flows to map existing affordances against PO routes and motives and identify opportunities for design—grounding the programme in PO-theoretical constraints, cycle-specific design trade-offs, and structured multi-stage evaluation sessions with 13 campaigners from seven countries. We then ran a five-arm between-subjects experiment (N=499) comparing petition conditions (Read, Sign, Write, Watch, Create). Our findings show how video affordances can be deliberately structured to transform one-off participation into deeper relational engagement, positioning PO as a transferable lens for reimagining civic technologies and moving activism from shallow clicks to more sustained care.