Related papers: Navigating the Thin Line: Examining User Behavior …
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
When interacting with information retrieval (IR) systems, users, affected by confirmation biases, tend to select search results that confirm their existing beliefs on socially significant contentious issues. To understand the judgments and…
The increasing prominence of Socially Responsible Consumers has brought about a heightened focus on the ethical, environmental, social, and ideological dimensions influencing product purchasing decisions. Despite this emphasis, studies have…
Search engines decide what we see for a given search query. Since many people are exposed to information through search engines, it is fair to expect that search engines are neutral. However, search engine results do not necessarily cover…
Despite a growing desire among consumers to shop responsibly, translating this intention into behaviour remains challenging. Previous work has identified that information seeking (or lack thereof) is a contributing factor to this…
Search engines could consistently favor certain values over the others, which is considered as biased due to the built-in infrastructures. Many studies have been dedicated to detect, control, and mitigate the impacts of the biases from the…
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…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently…
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…
This study examined how AI-generated summaries, which have become visually prominent in online search results, affect how users think about different issues. In a preregistered randomized controlled experiment, participants (N = 2,004)…
Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…
User-centered approaches have been extensively studied and used in the area of struggling search. Related research has targeted key aspects of users such as user satisfaction or frustration, and search success or failure, using a variety of…
Internet users highly rely on and trust web search engines, such as Google, to find relevant information online. However, scholars have documented numerous biases and inaccuracies in search outputs. To improve the quality of search results,…
While it is often assumed that searching for information to evaluate misinformation will help identify false claims, recent work suggests that search behaviours can instead reinforce belief in misleading news, particularly when users…
People who share similar opinions towards controversial topics could form an echo chamber and may share similar political views toward other topics as well. The existence of such connections, which we call connected behavior, gives…
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.…
In recent years, the influence of cognitive effects and biases on users' thinking, behaving, and decision-making has garnered increasing attention in the field of interactive information retrieval. The decoy effect, one of the main…
Applications that learn from opinionated documents, like tweets or product reviews, face two challenges. First, the opinionated documents constitute an evolving stream, where both the author's attitude and the vocabulary itself may change.…
The evolution of information-seeking processes, driven by search engines like Google, has transformed the access to information people have. This paper investigates how individuals' preexisting attitudes influence the modern…
Search query suggestions affect users' interactions with search engines, which then influences the information they encounter. Thus, bias in search query suggestions can lead to exposure to biased search results and can impact opinion…