Policy Sandboxing
Empathy As An Enabler Towards Inclusive Policy-Making
Andrea Mauri (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1)
Yen-Chia Hsu (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)
Himanshu Verma (TU Delft - Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence)
Andrea Tocchetti (Politecnico di Milano)
Marco Brambilla (Politecnico di Milano)
Alessandro Bozzon (TU Delft - Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence)
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Abstract
Digitally-supported participatory methods are often used in policy-making to develop inclusive policies by collecting and integrating citizen's opinions. However, these methods fail to capture the complexity and nuances in citizen's needs, i.e., citizens are generally unaware of other's needs, perspectives, and experiences. Consequently, policies developed with this underlying gap tend to overlook the alignment of multistakeholder perspectives, and design policies based on the optimization of high-level demographic features. In our contribution, we propose a method to enable citizens understand other's perspectives and calibrate their positions. First, we collected requirements and design principles to develop our approach by involving stakeholders and experts in policymaking in a series of workshops. Then, we conducted a crowdsourcing study with 420 participants to compare the effect of different text and images, on people's initial and final motivations and their willingness to change opinions. We observed that both influence participant's opinion change, however, the effect is more pronounced for textual modality. Finally, we discuss overarching implications of designing with empathy to mediate alignment of citizen's perspectives.
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