When people use web search engines to find information on debated topics, the search results they encounter can influence opinion formation and practical decision-making with potentially far-reaching consequences for the individual and society. However, current web search engines lack support for information-seeking strategies that enable responsible opinion formation, e.g., by mitigating confirmation bias and motivating engagement with diverse viewpoints. We conducted two preregistered user studies to test the benefits and risks of an intervention aimed at confirmation bias mitigation. In the first study, we tested the effect of warning labels, warning of the risk of confirmation bias, combined with obfuscations, hiding selected search results per default. We observed that obfuscations with warning labels effectively reduce engagement with search results. These initial findings did not allow conclusions about the extent to which the reduced engagement was caused by the warning label (reflective nudging element) versus the obfuscation (automatic nudging element). If obfuscation was the primary cause, this would raise concerns about harming user autonomy. We thus conducted a follow-up study to test the effect of warning labels and obfuscations separately. According to our findings, obfuscations run the risk of manipulating behavior instead of guiding it, while warning labels without obfuscations (purely reflective) do not exhaust processing capacities but encourage users to actively choose to decrease engagement with attitude-confirming search results. Therefore, given the risks and unclear benefits of obfuscations and potentially other automatic nudging elements to guide engagement with information, we call for prioritizing interventions that aim to enhance human cognitive skills and agency instead.

One way to help users navigate debated topics online is to apply stance detection in web search. Automatically identifying whether search results are against, neutral, or in favor could facilitate diversification efforts and support interventions that aim to mitigate cognitive biases. To be truly useful in this context, however, stance detection models not only need to make accurate (cross-topic) predictions but also be sufficiently explainable to users when applied to search results - an issue that is currently unclear. This paper presents a study into the feasibility of using current stance detection approaches to assist users in their web search on debated topics. We train and evaluate 10 stance detection models using a stance-annotated data set of 1204 search results. In a preregistered user study (N = 291), we then investigate the quality of stance detection explanations created using different explainability methods and explanation visualization techniques. The models we implement predict stances of search results across topics with satisfying quality (i.e., similar to the state-of-the-art for other data types). However, our results reveal stark differences in explanation quality (i.e., as measured by users' ability to simulate model predictions and their attitudes towards the explanations) between different models and explainability methods. A qualitative analysis of textual user feedback further reveals potential application areas, user concerns, and improvement suggestions for such explanations. Our findings have important implications for the development of user-centered solutions surrounding web search on debated topics.

Recent research claims that information cues and system attributes of algorithmic decision-making processes affect decision subjects' fairness perceptions. However, little is still known about how these factors interact. This paper presents a user study (N = 267) investigating the individual and combined effects of explanations, human oversight, and contestability on informational and procedural fairness perceptions for high- and low-stakes decisions in a loan approval scenario. We find that explanations and contestability contribute to informational and procedural fairness perceptions, respectively, but we find no evidence for an effect of human oversight. Our results further show that both informational and procedural fairness perceptions contribute positively to overall fairness perceptions but we do not find an interaction effect between them. A qualitative analysis exposes tensions between information overload and understanding, human involvement and timely decision-making, and accounting for personal circumstances while maintaining procedural consistency. Our results have important design implications for algorithmic decision-making processes that meet decision subjects' standards of justice.

Social choice aggregation strategies have been proposed as an explainable way to generate recommendations to groups of users. However, it is not trivial to determine the best strategy to apply for a specific group. Previous work highlighted that the performance of a group recommender system is affected by the internal diversity of the group members’ preferences. However, few of them have empirically evaluated how the specific distribution of preferences in a group determines which strategy is the most effective. Furthermore, only a few studies evaluated the impact of providing explanations for the recommendations generated with social choice aggregation strategies, by evaluating explanations and aggregation strategies in a coupled way. To fill these gaps, we present two user studies (N=399 and N=288) examining the effectiveness of social choice aggregation strategies in terms of users’ fairness perception, consensus perception, and satisfaction. We study the impact of the level of (dis-)agreement within the group on the performance of these strategies. Furthermore, we investigate the added value of textual explanations of the underlying social choice aggregation strategy used to generate the recommendation. The results of both user studies show no benefits in using social choice-based explanations for group recommendations. However, we find significant differences in the effectiveness of the social choice-based aggregation strategies in both studies. Furthermore, the specific group configuration (i.e., various scenarios of internal diversity) seems to determine the most effective aggregation strategy. These results provide useful insights on how to select the appropriate aggregation strategy for a specific group based on the level of (dis-)agreement within the group members’ preferences.

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 a societal level, snowball to compel extremism and polarization. Most existing approaches to support better search apply nudges that directly modify user behavior. Such interventions bear the risk of harming user autonomy. Here, we discuss the shift we envision towards autonomy-preserving interventions that boost users' metacognitive skills, specifically their intellectual humility (IH)-the ability to recognize the fallibility of one's beliefs and the limits of one's knowledge. While simple interventions to boost IH have shown promise, the effect on users' search behavior has yet to be investigated. We present critical research questions, challenges, and an initial research plan to advance knowledge in this area.

Adverse phenomena such as the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), where web search users change their attitude on a topic following whatever most highly-ranked search results promote, represent crucial challenges for research and industry. However, the current lack of automatic methods to comprehensively measure or increase viewpoint diversity in search results complicates the understanding and mitigation of such effects. This paper proposes a viewpoint bias metric that evaluates the divergence from a pre-defined scenario of ideal viewpoint diversity considering two essential viewpoint dimensions (i.e., stance and logic of evaluation). In a case study, we apply this metric to actual search results and find considerable viewpoint bias in search results across queries, topics, and search engines that could lead to adverse effects such as SEME. We subsequently demonstrate that viewpoint diversity in search results can be dramatically increased using existing diversification algorithms. The methods proposed in this paper can assist researchers and practitioners in evaluating and improving viewpoint diversity in search results.

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 cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, hindering well-informed attitude forming. To facilitate interaction with online debates, counter confirmation bias, and nudge users towards engagement with online debate, we propose (1) summaries of the arguments made in the debate and (2) personalized persuasive suggestions to motivate users to engage with the debate summaries. We tested the effect of four different versions of the debate display (without summary, with summary and neutral suggestion, with summary and personalized persuasive suggestion, with summary and random persuasive suggestion) on participants' attitude-opposing argument recall with a preregistered user study (N = 212). The user study results show no evidence for an effect of either the summary or the personalized persuasive suggestions on participants' attitude-opposing argument recall. Further, we did not observe confirmation bias in participants' argument recall, regardless of the debate display. We discuss these observations in light of additionally collected exploratory data, which provides some pointers towards possible causes for the lack of significant findings. Motivated by these considerations, we propose two new hypotheses and ideas for improving relevant properties of the study design for follow-up studies.

Research in the area of human information interaction (HII) typically represents viewpoints on debated topics in a binary fashion, as either against or in favor of a given topic (e.g., the feminist movement). This simple taxonomy, however, greatly reduces the latent richness of viewpoints and thereby limits the potential of research and practical applications in this field. Work in the communication sciences has already demonstrated that viewpoints can be represented in much more comprehensive ways, which could enable a deeper understanding of users' interactions with debated topics online. For instance, a viewpoint's stance usually has a degree of strength (e.g., mild or strong), and, even if two viewpoints support or oppose something to the same degree, they may use different logics of evaluation (i.e., underlying reasons). In this paper, we draw from communication science practice to propose a novel, two-dimensional way of representing viewpoints that incorporates a viewpoint's stance degree as well as its logic of evaluation. We show in a case study of tweets on debated topics how our proposed viewpoint label can be obtained via crowdsourcing with acceptable reliability. By analyzing the resulting data set and conducting a user study, we further show that the two-dimensional viewpoint representation we propose allows for more meaningful analyses and diversification interventions compared to current approaches. Finally, we discuss what this novel viewpoint label implies for HII research and how obtaining it may be made cheaper in the future.

We have defined an interdisciplinary program for training a new generation of researchers who will be ready to leverage the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models and techniques even by non-expert users. The final goal is to make AI self-explaining and thus contribute to translating knowledge into products and services for economic and social benefit, with the support of Explainable AI systems. Moreover, our focus is on the automatic generation of interactive explanations in natural language, the preferred modality among humans, with visualization as a complementary modality.

Explanations can help users to better understand why items have been recommended. Additionally, explanations for group recommender systems need to consider further goals than single-user recommender systems. For example, we need to balance group members' need for privacy with their need for transparency, since a transparent explanation might pose a privacy hazard. In an online experiment with real groups (n=114 participants: 38 groups of size 3), we seek to understand which factors influence people's privacy concerns when a single explanation is presented to a group in the tourism domain. In particular, we study the direct effects of three factors on privacy concern: a) group members' personality (using the ĝ€ Big Five' personality traits), b) specific preference scenarios (i.e., having minority or majority preferences compared to two other group members), c) the type of relationship they have in the group (i.e., loosely coupled heterogeneous, versus tightly coupled homogeneous). We find that for personality two traits, Extroversion, and Agreeableness, each significantly affects the privacy concern. Moreover, having the minority or majority preferences in the group, as well as the type of relationship people have in the group, have a strong and significant influence on participants' privacy concern. These results suggest that explanations presented to groups need to be adapted to all three factors (personality, type of relationship, and preference scenario) when considering the privacy concern of users.

Recent research has shown that explanations serve as an important means to increase transparency in group recommendations while also increasing users' privacy concerns. However, it is currently unclear what personal and contextual factors affect users' privacy concerns about various types of personal information. This paper studies the effect of users' personality traits and preference scenarios-having a majority or minority preference-on their privacy concerns regarding location and emotion information. To create natural scenarios of group decision-making where users can control the amount of information disclosed, we develop TouryBot, a chat-bot agent that generates natural language explanations to help group members explain their arguments for suggestions to the group in the tourism domain. We conducted a user study in which we instructed 541 participants to convince the group to either visit or skip a recommended place. Our results show that users generally have a larger concern regarding the disclosure of emotion compared to location information. However, we found no evidence that personality traits or preference scenarios affect privacy concerns in our task. Further analyses revealed that task design (i.e., the pressure on users to convince the group) had an effect on participants' emotion-related privacy concerns. Our study also highlights the utility of providing users with the option of partial disclosure of personal information, which appeared to be popular among the participants.

In web search on debated topics, algorithmic and cognitive biases strongly influence how users consume and process information. Recent research has shown that this can lead to a search engine manipulation effect (SEME): when search result rankings are biased towards a particular viewpoint, users tend to adopt this favored viewpoint. To better understand the mechanisms underlying SEME, we present a pre-registered, 5 x 3 factorial user study investigating whether order effects (i.e., users adopting the viewpoint pertaining to higher-ranked documents) can cause SEME. For five different debated topics, we evaluated attitude change after exposing participants with mild pre-existing attitudes to search results that were overall viewpoint-balanced but reflected one of three levels of algorithmic ranking bias. We found that attitude change did not differ across levels of ranking bias and did not vary based on individual user differences. Our results thus suggest that order effects may not be an underlying mechanism of SEME. Exploratory analyses lend support to the presence of exposure effects (i.e., users adopting the majority viewpoint among the results they examine) as a contributing factor to users' attitude change. We discuss how our findings can inform the design of user bias mitigation strategies.

Adaptive and personalized systems have become pervasive technologies that are gradually playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Indeed, we are now used to interact every day with algorithms that help us in several scenarios, ranging from services that suggest us music to be listened to or movies to be watched, to personal assistants able to proactively support us in complex decision-making tasks. As the importance of such technologies in our everyday lives grows, it is fundamental that the internal mechanisms that guide these algorithms are as clear as possible. Unfortunately, the current research tends to go in the opposite direction, since most of the approaches try to maximize the effectiveness of the personalization strategy (e.g., recommendation accuracy) at the expense of the explainability and the transparency of the model. The main research questions which arise from this scenario is simple and straightforward: How can we deal with such a dichotomy between the need for effective adaptive systems and the right to transparency and interpretability? The workshop aims to provide a forum for discussing such problems, challenges, and innovative research approaches in the area, by investigating the role of transparency and explainability on the recent methodologies for building user models or developing personalized and adaptive systems.

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 effect of task on interaction with attitude-confirming search results. We conducted a preregistered, between-subjects crowdsourced user study (N=328) comparing six groups: Three levels of obfuscation (targeted, random, none) and two levels of task (joint, two separate) for four debated topics. We found that both types of obfuscation influence user interactions, and in particular that targeted obfuscation helps decrease interaction with attitude-confirming search results. Future work is needed to understand how much of the observed effect is due to the strong influence of obfuscation, versus the warning label or the task design. We discuss design guidelines concerning system goals such as decreasing consumption of attitude-confirming search results, versus nudging users toward a more analytical mode of information processing. We also discuss implications for future work, such as the effects of interventions for confirmation bias mitigation over repeated exposure. We conclude with a strong word of caution: measures such as obfuscations should only be used for the benefit of the user, e.g., when they explicitly consent to mitigating their own biases.