Persuading users into verifying online fake news

Abstract. Checking authenticity of fake news before sharing online can reduce spread of misinformation. But fact-checking requires cognitive and psychological effort, which people are often not willing to give. Some fact-checking methods might even be counterproductive, entrenching people into their deeply held beliefs. Numerous online fact-checking services have emerged recently which verify false claims to address the issue. While these services are quite efficient technologically, they seriously overlook human behavioral factors associated with fake news. Persuasive systems have been proven successful in attitudinal and behavioral changes, which could be applied here as behavioral interventions for fact-checking. A review of current fact-checking services showed that they significantly lack persuasive features, resulting in a passive and linear user experience. Findings from cognitive science and persuasion literature paved way for development of a fact-checking mobile application that would encourage users into regular fact-checking. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the artifact showed promise of persuasion in combating fake news. Social support persuasive features were found most effective, followed by tunnelling and self-monitoring. Implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed

How much of commonsense and legal reasoning is formalizable? A review of conceptual obstacles

Fifty years of effort in artificial intelligence (AI) and the formalization of legal reasoning have produced both successes and failures. Considerable success in organizing and displaying evidence and its interrelationships has been accompanied by failure to achieve the original ambition of AI as applied to law: fully automated legal decision-making. The obstacles to formalizing legal reasoning have proved to be the same ones that make the formalization of commonsense reasoning so difficult, and are most evident where legal reasoning has to meld with the vast web of ordinary human knowledge of the world. Underlying many of the problems is the mismatch between the discreteness of symbol manipulation and the continuous nature of imprecise natural language, of degrees of similarity and analogy, and of probabilities

You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility

Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see—before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down—is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal. The central question, vital to our adjudicative model, is: How well can we expect a jury to determine credibility through the ordinary adversary processes of live testimony and vigorous impeachment? The answer, from all I have been able to see is: not very well

You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility

Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see—before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down—is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal. The central question, vital to our adjudicative model, is: How well can we expect a jury to determine credibility through the ordinary adversary processes of live testimony and vigorous impeachment? The answer, from all I have been able to see is: not very well

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Cross-examining suggestibility: memory, childhood, expertise

Initially a central topic for psychology, suggestibility has been forgotten, rediscovered, evaded definition, sabotaged experimentation and persistently triggers epistemological short-circuits when interconnecting psychological questions of memory, childhood and scientificity, with concrete legal issues of child witnesses' credibility, the disclosure of sexual abuse and psychological expertise in courts of law. The aim of this study is to trace suggestibility through history, theory, research and practice, and to explore its efficacy at the intersection of psychology and law, by examining and comparing the. concrete case of child witness practice in England and Germany. Taking a transdisciplinary approach the study draws on two interrelated sources of 'data' combining historical, theoretical and research literature with the analysis of empirical data. A genealogy if theory and research is combined with the results of reflexive interviews, conducted in England and Germany with practitioners from all those professions involved in creating, applying or dealing with knowledge about child witnesses and suggestibility: judges, prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, psychologists (researchers, experts) and social workers. Drawing on the work of G. Deleuze and 1. Stengers this study shows how practical tensions around reliable witnesses, evidence and expertise merge pragmatically with theoretical movements employed to adjust the discipline, thereby causing frictions and voids. In this sense suggestibility provides a liminal resource: It transgresses disciplinary boundaries and pervades pragmatic and theoretical, global and personal, historical and actual considerations, creating voids that allow us to reconsider the pragmatics of change and to redefine the issue of critical impact, as well as to reformulate the problem of child witness practice and children's suggestibility. The study hopes to make a concrete contribution to facilitating the just prosecution of sexual abuse by adding transparency to the complex and at times unhelpfully polarised field of child witness practice. By exploring the 'pragmatics of change' the study furthermore hopes to give an unsettling and productive impetus to theoretical debates within critical approaches to psychology

Contested environments: A critical discourse analysis of applications for resource consents in Northland

This thesis reports on a study of disputed applications for environmental resource consent conducted in Northland. The study was placed against the backdrop of the Resource Management Act (1991) as a major social artefact that has the capacity to change the social fabric of Northland through its influence on environmental policy in the region. The purpose of the study was to analyse the discourses that are produced in cases of disputed application in order to show the ways that the environment is constituted in language and to contend that the material reality of the Northland environment increasingly results from the communication that occurs within the legislative framework of the Resource Management Act (1991). Data for the study were collected through archival research augmented by semi-structured interviews and observations. The collected texts were assembled in case studies which told the stories of the cases for disputed applications for resource consent and analysed using the systems of critical discourse analysis developed by Fairclough (1992; 2003) and Chouliaraki and Fairclough (2000). The empirical work collects, considers and analyses three district plans, elements of a regional plan and two case studies. The first case study examines the multiple discourses in a case about noise in a quiet suburb, and the second deals with an application to abstract water for irrigation from a Northland river. The heart of this study was the stories citizens tell as they deal with the impact of proposed environmental change on their lives. The study shows the discursive interaction between citizens and administrative organisations, and the way that citizens constructed themselves and others in language in bids to influence policy and environmental decisions. In doing so, it examines the effect of the dialectic relationships between the moment of discourse and other moments in the social process (Harvey, 1996). Finally, the research shows the effect in the material world of discursive shifts from "nature" to "the environment". The research has contributed to knowledge by telling the stories of disputed applications for resource consent from the points of view of the citizens who were involved and showing the discourse resources available to them to position themselves against the discourse of the official position. It has also contributed to knowledge by showing that, despite the definitions of the environment contained in the discourse of the official position, each case is the site of citizens' struggles for their concept of the environment and their experience of it. In this regard, the research has examined the impact of the specific discursive constructions used by citizens on the environment. Finally, the research has placed the citizens' stories against the conjuncture of social practices (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999) connected with applications for resource consent, and revealed instances of the working of the Resource Management Act (1991) in the lives of citizens

Media agenda-building battles between Greenpeace and Shell : a rhetorical and discursive approach

The empirical focus of this research comprises the UK television news battles between Greenpeace (a highly media-aware International Non-Governmental Organisation (INGO)), and the oil company Shell (a multinational corporation (MNC)). Specifically, two such media battles are examined, both receiving international attention and intense media publicity during 1995:- The battle between Royal Dutch/Shell, particularly, its subsidiary Shell-UK, and Greenpeace over the deep-sea disposal of the Brent Spar oil platform;- The battle between Royal Dutch/Shell's Nigerian subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation (SPDC) (hereafter referred to as Shell-Nigeria), and Greenpeace (amongst others) over environmental pollution in Ogoniland, Nigeria.These two battles were chosen mainly because they share the same main protagonists - Greenpeace and Shell - providing rich material for a number of interesting questions regarding media agenda-building