Related papers: The Phantom Steering Effect in Q&A Websites
Modern web-based platforms show ranked lists of recommendations to users, attempting to maximise user satisfaction or business metrics. Typically, the goal of such systems boils down to maximising the exposure probability for items that are…
To what extent user's stance towards a given topic could be inferred? Most of the studies on stance detection have focused on analysing user's posts on a given topic to predict the stance. However, the stance in social media can be inferred…
Machine learning is pervasive. It powers recommender systems such as Spotify, Instagram and YouTube, and health-care systems via models that predict sleep patterns, or the risk of disease. Individuals contribute data to these models and…
In the physical world, people have dynamic preferences, e.g., the same situation can lead to satisfaction for some humans and to frustration for others. Personalization is called for. The same observation holds for online behavior with…
Shadow banning consists for an online social network in limiting the visibility of some of its users, without them being aware of it. Twitter declares that it does not use such a practice, sometimes arguing about the occurrence of "bugs" to…
We investigate how Simpson's paradox affects analysis of trends in social data. According to the paradox, the trends observed in data that has been aggregated over an entire population may be different from, and even opposite to, those of…
Images are increasingly being shared by software developers in diverse channels including question-and-answer forums like Stack Overflow. Although prior work has pointed out that these images are meaningful and provide complementary…
User engagement in online social networking depends critically on the level of social activity in the corresponding platform--the number of online actions, such as posts, shares or replies, taken by their users. Can we design data-driven…
Logical fallacies are common in public communication and can mislead audiences; fallacious arguments may still appear convincing despite lacking soundness, because convincingness is inherently subjective. We present the first computational…
In 2015, 391,000 people were injured due to distracted driving in the US. One of the major reasons behind distracted driving is the use of cell-phones, accounting for 14% of fatal crashes. Social media applications have enabled users to…
Humans are influenced by how information is presented, a phenomenon known as the framing effect. Prior work suggests that LLMs may also be susceptible to framing, but it has relied on synthetic data and did not compare to human behavior. To…
This study explores the impact of peer acknowledgement on learner engagement and implicit psychological attributes in written annotations on an online social reading platform. Participants included 91 undergraduates from a large North…
Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…
Human interactions are influenced by emotions, temperament, and affection, often conflicting with individuals' underlying preferences. Without explicit knowledge of those preferences, judging whether behaviour is appropriate becomes…
Crowds can often make better decisions than individuals or small groups of experts by leveraging their ability to aggregate diverse information. Question answering sites, such as Stack Exchange, rely on the "wisdom of crowds" effect to…
AI agents are becoming active decision-makers on the Internet. As they make decisions in the same environments as humans, the environments themselves can change to influence them. We call this $\textit{mecha-nudging}$: changes to how…
Artificial Intelligence based systems may be used as digital nudging techniques that can steer or coerce users to make decisions not always aligned with their true interests. When such systems properly address the issues of Fairness,…
Cognitive load is a significant challenge to users for being deliberative. Interface design has been used to mitigate this cognitive state. This paper surveys literature on the anchoring effect, partitioning effect and point-of-choice…
Most modern recommendation algorithms are data-driven: they generate personalized recommendations by observing users' past behaviors. A common assumption in recommendation is that how a user interacts with a piece of content (e.g., whether…
At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as…