Related papers: The Phantom Steering Effect in Q&A Websites
Many online social networks thrive on automatic sharing of friends' activities to a user through activity feeds, which may influence the user's next actions. However, identifying such social influence is tricky because these activities are…
Interactions between individuals and their participation in community activities are governed by how individuals identify themselves with their peers. We want to investigate such behavior for developers while they are learning and…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…
Activation steering is a popular white-box control technique that modifies model activations to elicit an abstract change in its behavior. It has also become a standard tool in interpretability (e.g., probing truthfulness, or translating…
Randomized experiments (A/B testings) have become the standard way for web-facing companies to guide innovation, evaluate new products, and prioritize ideas. There are times, however, when running an experiment is too complicated (e.g., we…
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the "right thing". What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we…
We address the problem of using observational data to estimate peer contagion effects, the influence of treatments applied to individuals in a network on the outcomes of their neighbors. A main challenge to such estimation is that homophily…
Norms are behavioral expectations in communities. Online communities are also expected to abide by the rules and regulations that are expressed in the code of conduct of a system. Even though community authorities continuously prompt their…
Simulating trajectories of virtual crowds is a commonly encountered task in Computer Graphics. Several recent works have applied Reinforcement Learning methods to animate virtual agents, however they often make different design choices when…
In recent years, recommendation systems have been widely applied in many domains. These systems are impotent in affecting users to choose the behavior that the system expects. Meanwhile, providing incentives has been proven to be a more…
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly show reasoning rationales alongside their answers, turning "reasoning" into a user-interface element. While step-by-step rationales are typically associated with model performance, how they…
Social information is particularly prominent in digital settings where the design of platforms can more easily give real-time information about the behaviour of peers and reference groups and thereby stimulate political activity. Changes to…
Anthropomorphic design is routinely used to make conversational agents more approachable and engaging. Yet its influence on users' perceptions remains poorly understood. Drawing on psychological theories, we propose that anthropomorphism…
Large language model (LLM) leaderboards rank AI models using standardized benchmarks and have become highly visible across computer science, despite known limitations in their reliability and robustness. Yet how they shape researchers'…
Online social networks create echo-chambers where people are infrequently exposed to opposing opinions. Even if such exposure occurs, the persuasive effect may be minimal or nonexistent. Recent studies have shown that exposure to opposing…
Nowadays human interactions largely take place on social networks, with online users' behavior often falling into a few general typologies or "social roles". Among these, opinion leaders are of crucial importance as they have the ability to…
News recommender systems are used by online news providers to alleviate information overload and to provide personalized content to users. However, algorithmic news curation has been hypothesized to create filter bubbles and to intensify…
Dark patterns utilize interface elements to trick users into performing unwanted actions. Online shopping websites often employ these manipulative mechanisms so as to increase their potential customer base, to boost their sales, or to…
Social learning is a fundamental mechanism shaping decision-making across numerous social networks, including social trading platforms. In those platforms, investors combine traditional investing with copying the behavior of others.…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to the proliferation of artificial agents in social contexts, ranging from education to online social media and financial markets, among many others. The increasing rate at which…