Searching for the Whole Truth: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Humility to Boost Better Search on Debated Topics

We often use search engines when seeking information for opinion-forming and decision-making on debated topics. However, searching for resources on debated topics to gain well-rounded knowledge is cognitively demanding, leaving us vulnerable to cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias. This can impede well-informed decision-making, and on...

Towards Healthy Engagement with Online Debates: An Investigation of Debate Summaries and Personalized Persuasive Suggestions

Online debates allow for large-scale participation by users with different opinions, values, and backgrounds. While this is beneficial for democratic discourse, such debates often tend to be cognitively demanding due to the high quantity and low quality of non-expert contributions. High cognitive demand, in turn, can make users vulnerable to...

This Item Might Reinforce Your Opinion: Obfuscation and Labeling of Search Results to Mitigate Confirmation Bias

During online information search, users tend to select search results that confirm previous beliefs and ignore competing possibilities. This systematic pattern in human behavior is known as confirmation bias. In this paper, we study the effect of obfuscation (i.e., hiding the result unless the user clicks on it) with warning labels and the...