Overcoming bias to learn about controversial topics

Abstract

Deciding whether a claim is true or false often requires a deeper understanding of the evidence supporting and contradicting the claim. However, when presented with many evidence documents, users do not necessarily read and trust them uniformly. Psychologists and other researchers have shown that users tend to follow and agree with articles and sources that hold viewpoints similar to their own, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. This suggests that when learning about a controversial topic, human biases and viewpoints about the topic may affect what is considered “trustworthy” or credible. It is an interesting challenge to build systems that can help users overcome this bias and help them decide the truthfulness of claims. In this article, we study various factors that enable humans to acquire additional information about controversial claims in an unbiased fashion. Specifically, we designed a user study to understand how presenting evidence with contrasting viewpoints and source expertise ratings affect how users learn from the evidence documents. We find that users do not seek contrasting viewpoints by themselves, but explicitly presenting contrasting evidence helps them get a well‐rounded understanding of the topic. Furthermore, explicit knowledge of the credibility of the sources and the context in which the source provides the evidence document not only affects what users read but also whether they perceive the document to be credible.

Reducing Controversy by Connecting Opposing Views

“…(c) The studies discussed above suggest that (i) it is possible to nudge people by recommending content from an opposing side [27], (ii) extreme recommendations might not work [16], (iii) people "in the middle" are easier to convince [22], (iv) expert users and hubs are often less biased and can play a role in convincing others [23,39] In the design of our algorithm we explicitly take into account the considerations (i)-(iv).…”

“…• We build on top of results from recent user studies [27,23,39] on how users prefer to consume content from opposing views and formulate the task as an edge-recommendation problem in an endorsement graph, that also takes into account the acceptance probability of a recommendation;…”

Seeing Things from a Different Angle:Discovering Diverse Perspectives about Claims

“…Similar to the previous scenarios, the BERT solver has a significant gain over a trivial baseline, while standing behind human with a significant margin. itate the development of systems that aid in better organization and access to information, with the hope that the access to more diverse information can address over-personalization too (Vydiswaran et al, 2014).…”

Tell me something my friends do not know: diversity maximization in social networks

“…A complementary line of work studies mechanisms that expose social-media users to content that is not aligned with their prior beliefs [23,28,34]. While these works focus on how to present information to users, addressing issues of interface and incentives, our work addresses the question of who to approach with the new information.…”