Design Implications for Explanations: A Case Study on Supporting Reflective Assessment of Potentially Misleading Videos

Design Implications for Explanations: A Case Study on Supporting Reflective Assessment of Potentially Misleading Videos

Inel, O. (TU Delft Web Information Systems)
Duricic, Tomislav (Graz University of Technology; Know-Center)
Kaur, Harmanpreet (University of Michigan)
Lex, Elisabeth (Graz University of Technology)
Tintarev, N. (TU Delft Web Information Systems; Universiteit Maastricht)

2021

Online videos have become a prevalent means for people to acquire information. Videos, however, are often polarized, misleading, or contain topics on which people have different, contradictory views. In this work, we introduce natural language explanations to stimulate more deliberate reasoning about videos and raise users’ awareness of potentially deceiving or biased information. With these explanations, we aim to support users in actively deciding and reflecting on the usefulness of the videos. We generate the explanations through an end-to-end pipeline that extracts reflection triggers so users receive additional information to the video based on its source, covered topics, communicated emotions, and sentiment. In a between-subjects user study, we examine the effect of showing the explanations for videos on three controversial topics. Besides, we assess the users’ alignment with the video’s message and how strong their belief is about the topic. Our results indicate that respondents’ alignment with the video’s message is critical to evaluate the video’s usefulness. Overall, the explanations were found to be useful and of high quality. While the explanations do not influence the perceived usefulness of the videos compared to only seeing the video, people with an extreme negative alignment with a video’s message perceived it as less useful (with or without explanations) and felt more confident in their assessment. We relate our findings to cognitive dissonance since users seem to be less receptive to explanations when the video’s message strongly challenges their beliefs. Given these findings, we provide a set of design implications for explanations grounded in theories on reducing cognitive dissonance in light of raising awareness about online deception.

controversial topics
explanations and justifications
online video deception
online videos
reflection triggers
reflective assessment

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2ee5c9c8-7808-466b-bd3f-60240ee4e115

https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2021.712072

0922-6389

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 4

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 O. Inel, Tomislav Duricic, Harmanpreet Kaur, Elisabeth Lex, N. Tintarev