NewsGuesser: Using Curiosity to Reduce Selective Exposure
Article No.: 99, Pages 1 - 22
Abstract
Selective exposure has long been a concern of HCI researchers as it can lead to ideological polarization and distrust in society. Efforts have tried to reduce selective exposure online by serving diversified news content, but their effectiveness has been limited by users' lack of motivation to engage with the diverse content offered. To address this, we design the NewsGuesser system, which leverages the insight that curiosity can prompt motivation and engagement, by asking readers to guess the source of their news. In interviews with 40 participants, balanced for partisan affiliation, we use NewsGuesser as a probe tool to explore how guessing affects their perceptions of selective exposure. Participants struggled with the guessing game, which revealed a misalignment between users' expectations of different news sources and reality. Faced with the visualizations of the (often inaccurate) guessing results, participants were able to reflect on their own biases and selective exposure. In a number of cases, the guessing process changed participants' impressions of news organizations and some expressed an interest in engaging with more diverse news sources. While many also found the guessing game frustrating, the system and interview results suggest a number of new directions for designing social media and news media platforms.
Supplemental Material
ZIP File
Supplemental material includes the participants' demographics, the full interview protocol and the NewsGuesser interface code.
- Download
- 13.01 MB
References
[1]
2010. Streams of content, limited attention: The flow of information through social media. Educause Review (2010).
[2]
Hayward P Andres. 2019. Active teaching to manage course difficulty and learning motivation. Journal of Further and Higher Education 43, 2 (2019), 220--235.
[3]
Maria-Virginia Aponte, Guillaume Levieux, and Stephane Natkin. 2011. Measuring the level of difficulty in single player video games. Entertainment Computing 2, 4 (2011), 205--213.
[4]
Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada A Adamic. 2015. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science 348, 6239 (2015), 1130--1132.
[5]
Martina Balestra, Orit Shaer, Johanna Okerlund, Madeleine Ball, and Oded Nov. 2016. The effect of exposure to social annotation on online informed consent beliefs and behavior. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 900--912.
[6]
Daniel Ellis Berlyne. 1954. A theory of human curiosity. British journal of psychology 45, 3 (1954), 180.
[7]
Daniel E Berlyne. 1960. Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. (1960).
[8]
Mark E Bouton. 2014. Why behavior change is difficult to sustain. Preventive medicine 68 (2014), 29--36.
[9]
Richard E Boyatzis. 1998. Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. sage.
[10]
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology 3, 2 (2006), 77--101.
[11]
Garvin Brod. 2021. Predicting as a learning strategy. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2021).
[12]
Garvin Brod, Marcus Hasselhorn, and Silvia A Bunge. 2018. When generating a prediction boosts learning: The element of surprise. Learning and Instruction 55 (2018), 22--31.
[13]
Pew Research Center. 2019. For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection. (2019).
[14]
Philip Cook, Douglas Gomery, and Lawrence Lichty. 1992. The Future of News: Television, Newspapers, Wire Services, Newsmagazines. Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
[15]
Irene Costera Meijer and Tim Groot Kormelink. 2015. Checking, sharing, clicking and linking: Changing patterns of news use between 2004 and 2014. Digital journalism 3, 5 (2015), 664--679.
[16]
Dave D'Alessio and Mike Allen. 2000. Media bias in presidential elections: A meta-analysis. Journal of communication 50, 4 (2000), 133--156.
[17]
Siamak Faridani, Ephrat Bitton, Kimiko Ryokai, and Ken Goldberg. 2010. Opinion space: a scalable tool for browsing online comments. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1175--1184.
[18]
Tom Feltwell, Gavin Wood, Phillip Brooker, Scarlett Rowland, Eric PS Baumer, Kiel Long, John Vines, Julie Barnett, and Shaun Lawson. 2020. Broadening Exposure to Socio-Political Opinions via a Pushy Smart Home Device. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--14.
[19]
Linda G Fielding et al. 1990. How Discussion Questions Influence Children's Story Understanding. Technical Report No. 490. (1990).
[20]
Marta Figlerowicz. 2015. GeoGuessr's Digital Pilgrimages. Room One Thousand 3, 3 (2015).
[21]
Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M Rao. 2016. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public opinion quarterly 80, S1 (2016), 298--320.
[22]
Meadhbh I Foster and Mark T Keane. 2019. The role of surprise in learning: different surprising outcomes affect memorability differentially. Topics in cognitive science 11, 1 (2019), 75--87.
[23]
Dieter Frey. 1986. Recent research on selective exposure to information. Advances in experimental social psychology 19 (1986), 41--80.
[24]
Mingkun Gao, Hyo Jin Do, and Wai-Tat Fu. 2017. An intelligent interface for organizing online opinions on controversial topics. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. 119--123.
[25]
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisc iMorales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017. Mary, mary, quite contrary: Exposing twitter users to contrarian news. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion. 201--205.
[26]
Kiran Garimella, Tim Smith, Rebecca Weiss, and Robert West. 2021. Political Polarization in Online News Consumption. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.06481 (2021).
[27]
Dedre Gentner, Jeffrey Loewenstein, and Leigh Thompson. 2003. Learning and transfer: A general role for analogical encoding. Journal of educational psychology 95, 2 (2003), 393.
[28]
Nabeel Gillani, Ann Yuan, Martin Saveski, Soroush Vosoughi, and Deb Roy. 2018. Me, my echo chamber, and I: introspection on social media polarization. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference. 823--831.
[29]
Github. 2022. news-please · PyPI. https://pypi.org/project/news-please/
[30]
Tim Groeling. 2013. Media Bias by the Numbers: Challenges and Opportunities in the Empirical Study of Partisan News. Annual Review of Political Science (2013).
[31]
Neil Harrington. 2005. It's too difficult! Frustration intolerance beliefs and procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences 39, 5 (2005), 873--883.
[32]
William Hart, Dolores Albarracín, Alice H Eagly, Inge Brechan, Matthew J Lindberg, and Lisa Merrill. 2009. Feeling validated versus being correct: a meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. Psychological bulletin 135, 4 (2009), 555.
[33]
Kayoko Inagaki and Giyoo Hatano. 1977. Amplification of cognitive motivation and its effects on epistemic observation. American Educational Research Journal 14, 4 (1977), 485--491.
[34]
Youngseung Jeon, Bogoan Kim, Aiping Xiong, Dongwon Lee, and Kyungsik Han. 2021. ChamberBreaker: Mitigating the Echo Chamber Effect and Supporting Information Hygiene through a Gamified Inoculation System. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2 (2021), 1--26.
[35]
Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y Hayden. 2015. The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron 88, 3 (2015), 449--460.
[36]
Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Axel Westerwick, and Benjamin K. Johnson. 2015. Selective Exposure in the Communication Technology Context. In The Handbook of the Psychology of Communication Technology, S. Shyam Sundar (Ed.).
[37]
Nate Kornell, Matthew Jensen Hays, and Robert A Bjork. 2009. Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 35, 4 (2009), 989.
[38]
Travis Kriplean, Jonathan Morgan, Deen Freelon, Alan Borning, and Lance Bennett. 2012. Supporting reflective public thought with considerit. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 265--274.
[39]
Travis Kriplean, Michael Toomim, JT Morgan, Alan Borning, and AJ Ko. 2011. REFLECT: Supporting active listening and grounding on the Web through restatement. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Hangzhou, China.
[40]
Travis Kriplean, Michael Toomim, Jonathan Morgan, Alan Borning, and Amy J Ko. 2012. Is this what you meant? Promoting listening on the web with reflect. In proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 1559--1568.
[41]
Juhi Kulshrestha, Motahhare Eslami, Johnnatan Messias, Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Saptarshi Ghosh, Krishna P Gummadi, and Karrie Karahalios. 2017. Quantifying search bias: Investigating sources of bias for political searches in social media. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. 417--432.
[42]
Preethi Lahoti, Kiran Garimella, and Aristides Gionis. 2018. Joint non-negative matrix factorization for learning ideological leaning on twitter. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 351--359.
[43]
Edith Law, Ming Yin, Joslin Goh, Kevin Chen, Michael A Terry, and Krzysztof Z Gajos. 2016. Curiosity killed the cat, but makes crowdwork better. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 4098--4110.
[44]
Heidi Legg. 2021. Have you heard the news? But who owns what you're hearing and reading? We need to know. USA Today (2021).
[45]
Q Vera Liao and Wai-Tat Fu. 2013. Beyond the filter bubble: interactive effects of perceived threat and topic involvement on selective exposure to information. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2359--2368.
[46]
Q Vera Liao and Wai-Tat Fu. 2014. Can you hear me now? Mitigating the echo chamber effect by source position indicators. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. 184--196.
[47]
Yabing Liu, Krishna P Gummadi, Balachander Krishnamurthy, and Alan Mislove. 2011. Analyzing facebook privacy settings: user expectations vs. reality. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference. 61--70.
[48]
George Loewenstein. 1994. The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological bulletin 116, 1 (1994), 75.
[49]
Elisa D Mekler, Florian Brühlmann, Alexandre N Tuch, and Klaus Opwis. 2017. Towards understanding the effects of individual gamification elements on intrinsic motivation and performance. Computers in Human Behavior 71 (2017), 525--534.
[50]
Janet Metcalfe and Bridgid Finn. 2012. Hypercorrection of high confidence errors in children. Learning and Instruction 22, 4 (2012), 253--261.
[51]
Kathryn R Middleton, Stephen D Anton, and Michal G Perri. 2013. Long-term adherence to health behavior change. American journal of lifestyle medicine 7, 6 (2013), 395--404.
[52]
Lillio Mok, Michael Inzlicht, and Ashton Anderson. 2023. Echo Tunnels: Polarized News Sharing Online Runs Narrow but Deep. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 17. 662--673.
[53]
Edward Munnich and Michael A Ranney. 2019. Learning from surprise: Harnessing a metacognitive surprise signal to build and adapt belief networks. Topics in cognitive science 11, 1 (2019), 164--177.
[54]
Sean Munson, Stephanie Lee, and Paul Resnick. 2013. Encouraging reading of diverse political viewpoints with a browser widget. In Proceedings of The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 7.
[55]
Sean Munson and Paul Resnick. 2010. Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much. In Proceedings of CHI.
[56]
Ground News. 2022. Our Approach to Media Bias. https://ground.news/media-bias.
[57]
Christine Ogan, Rosemary Pennington, Olesya Venger, and Daniel Metz. 2018. Who drove the discourse? News coverage and policy framing of immigrants and refugees in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Communications (2018).
[58]
Eli Pariser. 2011. The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin UK.
[59]
Souneil Park, Seungwoo Kang, Sangyoung Chung, and Junehwa Song. 2009. NewsCube: delivering multiple aspects of news to mitigate media bias. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 443--452.
[60]
Neil Peirce, Owen Conlan, and Vincent Wade. 2008. Adaptive educational games: Providing non-invasive personalised learning experiences. In 2008 second IEEE international conference on digital game and intelligent toy enhanced learning. IEEE, 28--35.
[61]
Erik Peterson, Sharad Goel, and Shanto Iyengar. 2018. Echo chambers and partisan polarization: Evidence from the 2016 presidential campaign. Unpublished manuscript. https://5harad. com/papers/selecfive-exposure. pdf (2018).
[62]
Richard E Petty and John T Cacioppo. 2012. Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. Springer Science & Business Media.
[63]
W James Potter. 2010. The state of media literacy. Journal of broadcasting & electronic media 54, 4 (2010), 675--696.
[64]
Stacy Rebich-Hespanha, Ronald E Rice, Daniel R Montello, Sean Retzloff, Sandrine Tien, and João P Hespanha. 2015. Image themes and frames in US print news stories about climate change. Environmental Communication 9, 4 (2015), 491--519.
[65]
K Ann Renninger and Suzanne E Hidi. 2015. The power of interest for motivation and engagement. Routledge.
[66]
Ronald E Robertson, Shan Jiang, Kenneth Joseph, Lisa Friedland, David Lazer, and Christo Wilson. 2018. Auditing partisan audience bias within google search. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW (2018), 1--22.
[67]
Tom Rosenstiel, Nicole Willcoxon, Emily Swanson, Kevin Loker, Jeff Sonderman, Katie Kutso, Jane Elizabeth, Katherine Ellis, David Sterrett, Dan Malato, Liz Kantor, Jennifer Benz, Trevor Tompson, and Xian Tao. 2018. Americans and the News Media: What they do - and don't - understand about each other. The Media Insight Project (2018).
[68]
Leah R Rosenzweig, Bence Bago, Adam J Berinsky, and David G Rand. 2021. Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review (2021).
[69]
Daniel M Russell, Gregorio Convertino, Aniket Kittur, Peter Pirolli, and Elizabeth Anne Watkins. 2018. Sensemaking in a senseless world: 2018 workshop abstract. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--7.
[70]
Jennifer L Sabourin and James C Lester. 2013. Affect and engagement in Game-BasedLearning environments. IEEE transactions on affective computing 5, 1 (2013), 45--56.
[71]
Donald A Schon. 1984. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Vol. 5126. Basic books.
[72]
Norman J Slamecka and Peter Graf. 1978. The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of experimental Psychology: Human learning and Memory 4, 6 (1978), 592.
[73]
Beautiful Soup. 15. Beautiful Soup Documentation - Beautiful Soup 4.4.0 documentation. https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[74]
Joachim Stiensmeier-Pelster, Alice Martini, and Rainer Reisenzein. 1995. The role of surprise in the attribution process. Cognition & Emotion 9, 1 (1995), 5--31.
[75]
Natalie Jomini Stroud. 2008. Media use and political predispositions: Revisiting the concept of selective exposure. Political Behavior 30, 3 (2008), 341--366.
[76]
Gallup & the Knight Foundation. 2019. State of Public Trust in Local News. (2019).
[77]
Elisabeth Vogl, Reinhard Pekrun, Kou Murayama, and Kristina Loderer. 2020. Surprised--curious--confused: Epistemic emotions and knowledge exploration. Emotion 20, 4 (2020), 625.
[78]
Elisabeth Vogl, Reinhard Pekrun, Kou Murayama, Kristina Loderer, and Sandra Schubert. 2019. Surprise, curiosity, and confusion promote knowledge exploration: Evidence for robust effects of epistemic emotions. Frontiers in psychology 10 (2019), 2474.
[79]
Jessica Z Wang, Amy X Zhang, and David R Karger. 2022. Designing for Engaging with News using Moral Framing towards Bridging Ideological Divides. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, GROUP (2022), 1--23.
[80]
Gavin Wood, Kiel Long, Tom Feltwell, Scarlett Rowland, Phillip Brooker, Jamie Mahoney, John Vines, Julie Barnett, and Shaun Lawson. 2018. Rethinking engagement with online news through social and visual co-annotation. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 1--12.
[81]
Wendy Wood and David T Neal. 2016. Healthy through habit: Interventions for initiating & maintaining health behavior change. Behavioral Science & Policy 2, 1 (2016), 71--83.
Index Terms
- NewsGuesser: Using Curiosity to Reduce Selective Exposure
Recommendations
Home Routines Suitable for Incidental Exposure to News: Pilot Field Experiment
UbiComp/ISWC '22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2022 ACM International Symposium on Wearable ComputersThe explosion of media choices promotes "selective exposure;" entertainment-oriented people tend to consume only the information tied to their interests. It reduces their consumption and knowledge of broad info, including social issues. We consider ...
Older Adults’ Motivation for Physical Activity Using Gamified Technology: An Eight-Week Experimental Study
Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Healthy and Active AgingAbstractWhile gamification strategy has been used in many areas such as marketing, education, health and wellness, only a few projects have investigated the relevance of longer study durations. There are limited number of long-term studies in the usage ...
Now We’re Talking? Understanding the Interplay Between Online Selective and Incidental Exposure and Their Influence on Online Cross-Cutting Political Discussion
This study examines how two distinct patterns of online political information exposure—pro-attitudinal selective exposure and counter-attitudinal incidental exposure—can work together to influence engagement in online cross-cutting political discussion. ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
Copyright © 2024 Owner/Author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 26 April 2024
Published in PACMHCI Volume 8, Issue CSCW1
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 311Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)311
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)58
Reflects downloads up to 28 Dec 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in