94,629 research outputs found
Measuring Online Social Bubbles
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information,
spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that
social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of
view, and even foster polarization and misinformation. Here we explore and
validate this hypothesis quantitatively for the first time, at the collective
and individual levels, by mining three massive datasets of web traffic, search
logs, and Twitter posts. Our analysis shows that collectively, people access
information from a significantly narrower spectrum of sources through social
media and email, compared to search. The significance of this finding for
individual exposure is revealed by investigating the relationship between the
diversity of information sources experienced by users at the collective and
individual level. There is a strong correlation between collective and
individual diversity, supporting the notion that when we use social media we
find ourselves inside "social bubbles". Our results could lead to a deeper
understanding of how technology biases our exposure to new information
Developing Critical Thinking in online search
Digital skills especially those related to Information Literacy, are today
considered fundamental to the education of students, both at school
and at university. Searching and evaluating information found on the
Internet is surely an important competency. An effective way to develop
this competency is to educate students about the development of critical
thinking. The article presents a qualitative-quantitative survey conducted
during a course in Educational Technologies within a five year Degree
program. The outcomes of the survey reveal some interesting behaviors and
perceptions of students when they are faced with the Web search process
and the characteristics of their critical thinking processes: some aspects
of critical thinking are generally well supported, but others are acquired
only after specific training. Experience shows that if properly motivated by
metacognitive reflections and a clear method, students can actually critically
evaluate the information presented online, the sources, and the sustainability of the arguments found. Positive results also occurred when the evaluation process was done in a collaborative modality
Why Rational People Polarize
I argue that several of the psychological tendencies that drive polarization could arise from purely rational mechanisms, due to the fact that some types of evidence are predictably more ambiguous than others
Implicit Bias and the Idealized Rational Self
The underrepresentation of women, people of color, and especially women of color—and the corresponding overrepresentation of white men—is more pronounced in philosophy than in many of the sciences. I suggest that part of the explanation for this lies in the role played by the idealized rational self, a concept that is relatively influential in philosophy but rarely employed in the sciences. The idealized rational self models the mind as consistent, unified, rationally transcendent, and introspectively transparent. I hypothesize that acceptance of the idealized rational self leads philosophers to underestimate the influence of implicit bias on their own judgments and prevents them from enacting the reforms necessary to minimize the effects of implicit bias on institutional decision-making procedures. I consider recent experiments in social psychology that suggest that an increased sense of one’s own objectivity leads to greater reliance on bias in hiring scenarios, and I hypothesize how these results might be applied to philosophers’ evaluative judgments. I discuss ways that the idealized rational self is susceptible to broader critiques of ideal theory, and I consider some of the ways that the picture functions as a tool of active ignorance and color-evasive racism
A plea for minimally biased naturalistic philosophy
Naturalistic philosophers rely on literature search and review in a number of ways and for different purposes. Yet this article shows how processes of literature search and review are likely to be affected by widespread and systematic biases. A solution to this problem is offered here. Whilst the tradition of systematic reviews of literature from scientific disciplines has been neglected in philosophy, systematic reviews are important tools that minimize bias in literature search and review and allow for greater reproducibility and transparency. If naturalistic philosophers wish to reduce bias in their research, they should then supplement their traditional tools for literature search and review by including systematic methodologies
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