Explaining Search Result Stances to Opinionated People
Z. Wu T. Draws F. Cau F. Barile A. Rieger N. Tintarev
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, e.g., the confirmation bias. In this paper, we investigate whether
stance labels and their explanations can help users consume more diverse search
results. We automatically classify and label search results on three topics
(i.e., intellectual property rights, school uniforms, and atheism) as against,
neutral, and in favor, and generate explanations for these labels. In a user
study (N =203), we then investigate whether search result stance bias (balanced
vs biased) and the level of explanation (plain text, label only, label and
explanation) influence the diversity of search results clicked. We find that
stance labels and explanations lead to a more diverse search result
consumption. However, we do not find evidence for systematic opinion change
among users in this context. We believe these results can help designers of
search engines to make more informed design decisions.