When Personalization Is Not an Option: An In-The-Wild Study on Persuasive News Recommendation

Abstract

Aiming at granting wide access to their contents, online information providers often choose not to have registered users, and therefore must give up personalization. In this paper, we focus on the case of non-personalized news recommender systems, and explore persuasive techniques that can, nonetheless, be used to enhance recommendation presentation, with the aim of capturing the user’s interest on suggested items leveraging the way news is perceived. We present the results of two evaluations “in the wild”, carried out in the context of a real online magazine and based on data from 16,134 and 20,933 user sessions, respectively, where we empirically assessed the effectiveness of persuasion strategies which exploit logical fallacies and other techniques. Logical fallacies are inferential schemes known since antiquity that, even if formally invalid, appear as plausible and are therefore psychologically persuasive. In particular, our evaluations allowed us to compare three persuasive scenarios based on the Argumentum Ad Populum fallacy, on a modified version of the Argumentum ad Populum fallacy (Group-Ad Populum), and on no fallacy (neutral condition), respectively. Moreover, we studied the effects of the Accent Fallacy (in its visual variant), and of positive vs. negative Framing.

A Storytelling Robot Managing Persuasive and Ethical Stances via ACT-R: An Exploratory Study

“…The ad populum, on the other hand, does not seem to have any efficacy. As anticipated above, this datum is compliant with other findings exploited in the context of persuasive news and e-commerce item recommendations [ 33 ]. As a consequence, this technique could be probably left aside in future works since it does not seem to work properly when employed within technological artifacts.…”

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact

“…These include using visuals to increase item salience, item re-ranking, and setting defaults. For news recommendation specifically, Gena et al (2019) found that nudges based on giving users the idea certain items were popular were not effective, while negative framing (nudging users to consume certain news items because of limited availability) was. The authors argue that future work should address which types of nudges are ethically acceptable in the area of persuasive technologies.…”

Consumer Attitudes toward News Delivering: An Experimental Evaluation of the Use and Efficacy of Personalized Recommendations

“…Recommender systems are systems with the ability to provide suggestions or to direct a user to a service, product, or content, with the aim of maximizing the personal interest. Decades of research have produced multiple recommendation algorithms [6], mechanisms for evaluating their effectiveness, including user studies [7], online evaluations A/B tests and offline evaluations [8], and user interfaces and experiences to embody them [9]. Today, the interest in this area still remains high and current most highly rated Internet sites as Amazon, eBay, or YouTube use recommender systems as part of the services they provide to their subscribers.…”