When using web search engines to conduct inquiries on debated topics, searchers’ interactions with search results are commonly affected by a combination of searcher and system biases. While prior work has mainly investigated these biases in isolation, ...

Web search has evolved into a platform people rely on for opinion formation on debated topics. Yet, pursuing this search intent can carry serious consequences for individuals and society and involves a high risk of biases. We argue that web search ...

When people use web search engines to find information on debated topics, the search results they encounter can influence opinion formation and practical decision-making with potentially far-reaching consequences for the individual and society. However, ...

An essential characteristic for unbiased and diligent information-seeking that can enable informed opinion formation and decision-making is intellectual humility (IH), the awareness of the limitations of one’s knowledge and opinions. While researchers ...

Social choice aggregation strategies have been proposed as an explainable way to generate recommendations to groups of users. However, it is not trivial to determine the best strategy to apply for a specific group. Previous work highlighted that ...

We often use search engines when seeking information for opinion-forming and decision-making on debated topics. However, searching for resources on debated topics to gain well-rounded knowledge is cognitively demanding, leaving us vulnerable to ...

Adverse phenomena such as the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), where web search users change their attitude on a topic following whatever most highly-ranked search results promote, represent crucial challenges for research and industry. ...

With increasing digitalization, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous. AI-based systems to identify, optimize, automate, and scale solutions to complex economic and societal problems are being proposed and implemented. This has motivated ...

Online debates allow for large-scale participation by users with different opinions, values, and backgrounds. While this is beneficial for democratic discourse, such debates often tend to be cognitively demanding due to the high quantity and low ...

While the web offers a great potential to find and share information, the cognitively demanding conditions of online interactions can leave users vulnerable to cognitive biases, such as the confirmation bias – the tendency to favor information that ...

During online information search, users tend to select search results that confirm previous beliefs and ignore competing possibilities. This systematic pattern in human behavior is known as confirmation bias. In this paper, we study the effect of ...

To be accepted in our everyday life and to be valuable interaction partners, robots should be able to display emotional and empathic behaviors. That is why there has been a great focus on developing empathy in robots in recent years. However, there is no ...