Related papers: Self-directed online information search can affect…
How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
Little research has explored how information engagement (IE), the degree to which individuals interact with and use information in a manner that manifests cognitively, behaviorally, and affectively. This study explored the impact of…
In-person instruction for professional development or other types of workplace training provides a social environment and immediate feedback mechanisms that typically ensure all participants are successful. Online, self-paced instruction…
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…
Data videos have become a prominent vessel for communicating data to broad audiences, and a common object of study in information visualization. Many of these videos include music, yet the impact of music on how people experience data…
Town hall-type debates are increasingly moving online, irrevocably transforming public discourse. Yet, we know relatively little about crucial social dynamics that determine which arguments are more likely to be successful. This study…
Reinforcement learning in environments with many action-state pairs is challenging. At issue is the number of episodes needed to thoroughly search the policy space. Most conventional heuristics address this search problem in a stochastic…
Social media has enabled users and organizations to obtain information about technology usage like software usage and even security feature usage. However, on the dark side it has also allowed an adversary to potentially exploit the users…
Background. Incidental emotions users feel during their online activities may alter their privacy behavioral intentions. Aim. We investigate the effect of incidental affect (fear and happiness) on privacy behavioral intention. Method. We…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
AI-based social media platforms has already transformed the nature of economic and social interaction. AI enables the massive scale and highly personalized nature of online information sharing that we now take for granted. Extensive…
Philosophical accounts of persuasion often assume that shared evidence and rational argumentation should lead to a convergence of views between peers, yet everyday discourse often suggests otherwise. In this study, we use large language…
The emergence of online social networks has greatly facilitated the diffusion of information and behaviors. While the two diffusion processes are often intertwined, "talking the talk" does not necessarily mean "walking the talk"--those who…
Can digital ads encourage users exposed to inaccurate information sources to follow accurate ones? We conduct a large-scale field experiment (N=28,582) on X, formerly Twitter, with users who follow accounts that spread health…
End-to-end multi-task dialogue systems are usually designed with separate modules for the dialogue pipeline. Among these, the policy module is essential for deciding what to do in response to user input. This policy is trained by…
Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…
Deliberation among individuals online plays a key role in shaping the opinions that drive votes, purchases, donations and other critical offline behavior. Yet, the determinants of opinion-change via persuasion in deliberation online remain…
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…